Marketing: A Recipe for Businesses to Leverage Out of Recession in Nigeria
Ladokun, Isaac Olujide
Department of Marketing
The Polytechnic, Ibadan, Oyo State, Nigeria
ABSTRACT
This paper is a literary reflection of how marketing can assist businesses to survive during economic recession. A recession is when the economy declines significantly for at least six months. That means there’s a drop in the real GDP, Income, Employment, Manufacturing, and retail sales. For a layman’s understanding, a recession is a period of general economic slowdown. Recently, the National Bureau of Statistics revealed Nigeria’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) figure which showed that the country’s economy contracted by 2.06 percent. This means Nigeria is now officially in a recession. Nigeria’s recession is characterised by very high inflation, declining real wages and accelerating unemployment and underemployment. This paper is based on desktop research. Information was collected from textbooks written by renowned authors, and research based articles published in the Newspapers, Professional and Academic Journals in the field of marketing and other relevant areas. The paper revealed the redemptive contribution of Marketing to businesses during recession as Delivery of standard of living to the society, Decrease in distribution cost, Provision of Job Opportunities, Contribute to Gross National Product, Acceleration of Economic Growth, Economic Resuscitation and Business Turn- Around, Building Capital, Fair Prices for Agriculture and Developer of Standards. This paper concluded that marketers must therefore, place emphasis on developing marketing system designed to utilize to the utmost of the economic level of development. This paper recommended redemptive marketing strategies to businesses during recession which include reduction of costs, training of staff, focusing on quality, reviewing of marketing strategies, excellent customer service and expanding geographically.
Keywords: Recession, Economy, Marketing, Redeeming, Economic Growth, Strategies.
