With the ecomomy suffering dramatically one would think that expenditures for marketing related activities would see a comparable decline. However according to a recently published study by the CMO group, this isn’t likely to happen. According to their polls:

Seventy-one percent of chief marketing officers in the study do not plan on cutting their company’s marketing budget, while only 14 percent said they would.

Other key findings:

• When asked which budget line items would be cut first, advertising and mass marketing strategies (32 percent) were cited most frequently.
• Online strategies, such as search engine optimization and online marketing campaigns, were cited as the least likely to be cut, followed by public relations campaigns.

“There is a school of thought that says marketing is more important than ever in a recession, and our survey results show that a number of companies seem to be following that philosophy,” said Pete Krainik, CMO Club founder and former CMO at DoubleClick, in a statement.

Fascinating thinking. For many small businesses, however, the struggle will be to survive, not maintain the marketing investment.