Abstract

The performance of businesses and organizations and even their survival can be severely affected by recessions. However, all firms are not equally affected by a recession. In fact, some firms even experience better conditions in markets during recessions. Past studies and investigations about marketing in economic turbulent times and especially in proactive marketing suggest that some firms view a recession as an opportunity and develop an aggressive marketing reaction, while others cut back, waiting for the recession to pass. We use the term proactive marketing, to represent the strategic reaction of companies to a recession, or more generally, to a turbulent environment. We show that proactive marketing is an important factor for a company to view and react to recessions. Specifically, we develop and test a model of the antecedents and consequences of proactive marketing during a recession. The results of a survey of 45 senior marketing executives in Abbasabad Industrial Park in Iran reveal that some companies do accept and execute proactive marketing during recessions. Our results indicate that if companies have a strategic emphasis on marketing, embody an entrepreneurial culture, possess slack resources, they will more likely to have a proactive marketing reaction during turbulent times especially recessions. Also, results show that proactive marketing plays a significant role in improving both market and business performance during the recession. The implications of our results can be discussed for both marketing theory and managerial practice.

Keywords:

Business performance, entrepreneurial culture, marketing strategy, proactive marketing, recession, slack resources,

References

Competing interests

The authors have no competing interests.

Open Access Policy

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.

Copyright

The authors have no competing interests.