Taking Advantage of Tumultuous Times, a series of articles and narrated slideshows from Monitor, offers insights into critical issues organizations face—from corporate strategy to adaptive cost cutting—during this unprecedented period of economic uncertainty and disruption challenging industries across the globe. This article explains how to use strategic pricing strategies to survive a difficult economy and emerge from it stronger and more competitive.

Facing a sharp economic downturn and fundamental shifts in the way buyers learn and make decisions, companies must adapt their mix of marketing expenditures and develop new models for customer engagement. These new models, informed by insight into how customers think and behave, welcome shoppers’ involvement in shaping when, where and how they receive information and how they interact with products and brands.

Eastman Chemical Company turned to Monitor Group to help it drive organic growth in a highly competitive and commoditized B2B market for plastic packaging.

In this article from Marketing Management, Courtland Jenkins of Eastman Chemical and Monitor's Geoff Tuff, outline the challenges the company faced and how they worked to solve them: analyzing which customer segments valued Eastman's innovations, understanding the best means for communicating with those customers and demonstrating customer value.

These are unprecedented times for corporate executives—incredible volatility in the markets, sinking consumer confidence, a new financial crisis every week.  As a result, executives need to act quickly to tackle short term problems while setting the stage for long term growth. While we’ve dealt with recession before, the level of volatility and structural change posed by this crisis calls for a radically different playbook of options for achieving growth. 

In our view, there are certain, key levers companies can pull to find real growth and address the uncertainty.  The topics covered here can help shape your leadership agenda.

Top-line growth does exist in a recession, but finding it requires that marketing leaders be relentless in their pursuit of ways to redefine the playing field, be it through innovative go-to-market models, offer structures, or doubling and tripling down on the highest potential brands or segments.

In this paper, Monitor's Mark Pocharski explains how the strongest marketing organizations provide insight to help their companies make profitable decisions and minimize risk.

Once at the mercy of marketers, customers have developed coping mechanisms to combat the torrent of messages that come their way. Companies need to move past traditional approaches to get their attention.

In this Conference Board article Jennifer Lacks Kaplan and Yakir Siegel, both partners at Monitor Group, discuss five principles that can help companies better focus marketing investment decisions in a challenging world of new technologies and delivery channels.

In this Harvard Business Review forethought article, Chris Meyer supports his prediction that, "A perfect storm is brewing for network advertising at the end of the year, and it will be gigantic for having been pent up so long."

In this short presentation Monitor Partner Victoria Levy discusses a critical and timely issue facing most companies…how to get more out of marketing spend during recessionary times.

Ask the average executive who is pursuing an organic growth strategy how he plans to achieve his objectives, and the answer will typically turn to the “new.” This is a common and unfortunate bias. Too many companies focus their growth investments on opportunities outside the core of their business, ignoring near-in and much more profitable growth that is available simply by serving core customers better.

In this video Jeffrey Rayport, founder and chairman of Marketspace LLC, talks about the increased commoditization of products and services and a new source of competitive advantage.