happened.’ Don’t get me wrong. I am not opposed to all promotions. I would not, for example, think of launching a detergent without sampling to consumers. Pricing is guesswork It is usually assumed that marketers use scientific methods to determine the price of their products. Nothing could be further from the truth. In almost every case, the process of decision is one of guesswork. The higher you price your product, the more desirable it becomes in the eyes of the consumer. Yet when Professor Reisz of the University of Iowa tried to relate the prices of 679 brands of food products to their quality, he found that the correlation between quality and price was almost zero. Most of the marketers I know are afraid of pricing their products above competiton. At a dinner in Europe three years ago, the head of Research and Development in a famous company told me, ‘I have never seen my company go to market with the best product I could make. Time after time our marketers force me to give them an inferior product at a lower price.’ I was able to tell him that there are now unmistakable signs of a trend in favor of superior products at premium prices. The consumer is not a moron, she is your wife. Marketing in recession What should you do in times of recession, when you need every penny to sustain your earnings? Stop advertising? If you stop advertising a brand which is still in its introductory phase, you will probably kill it – for ever. Studies of the last six recessions have demonstrated that companies which do not cut back their advertising budgets achieve greater increases in profit than companies which do cut back. In a Morril survey of 40,000 men and women involved in the purchase of 23 industrial products over five years, it was found that share-of- market went up in bad times – when advertising was continued. I have come to regard advertising as part of the product, to be treated as a production cost, not a selling cost. It follows that it should not be cut back when times are hard, any more than you would stint any other