The first casualty of a downturn is  the marketing budget. Despite the best of intentions and the Board’s “commitment to the long term”, it’s seen by many as low-hanging fruit that can be pruned easily.

There are three ways to handle this:

a) go to a seminar on ‘how to protect your budget’ (and spend some of it in the process);

b) go into mourning, tell everyone how your hands are tied and that the company just doesn’t “get it”;

c) think. Necessity is the mother of invention.

When you are down to your last dollar, don’t complain – create. An absence of spend doesn’t mean an absence of marketing. It just calls for a different kind of marketing.

I thought this while walking down High Street Kensington in London. Among the bling-based cacophony (the gaudiness of the Christmas windows is deafening) one shop stands out.

While everyone else has zigged, Terra Plana has zagged.

Its display is a model of modesty, and how marketing will look over the next few years; simple, creative and impactful. It works for six reasons:

1) Product as hero: the store’s reason for being is at the heart of the communication. It’s a very direct way of communicating a proposition;

2) Communication congruence: stylish and innovative, it reflects the values and positioning of the business – a new kind of shoe company with a new kind of shoe;

3) Understatement: it stands out in a noisy market by being quiet;

4) Call to action: rather than a bland, meaningless ‘Merry Christmas’, it empathises with the passers-by, and offers a remedy to their current discomfort;

5) Specific and achievable: the selling will happen in the shop: all the marketing wants you to do is come in;

6) The human factor: there’s a personal scale to this – it’s not hard to imaging someone sitting and threading the laces through the holes. There’s a very clear people component to the story.

As you finalise your marketing plans for 2010, I suggest this is a good checklist with which to judge  the quality of your campaigns and programs.

Less can be more.