Marketing budgets always get twitchy when the economy wobbles. Uncertainty creeps in, boardrooms tense up, and the marketing line item is usually the first thing finance circles in red.
We caught up with Aruna Rajaram, Executive Director and Head of Brand, MENA at Kantar, on the sidelines of Rewiring Growth and Marketing Strategy, Abu Dhabi Edition, a C-suite marketing roundtable organized by Communicate and hosted by INSEAD, where she was among the speakers. Drawing on remarks from the roundtable and a follow-up conversation with Communicate, Rajaram outlined why marketers risk falling into what she calls the “downturn reflex.”
Rajaram describes a region in flux. TV consumption, once the anchor of media planning, dropped from 59 percent to 35 percent within . Social media usage fell from 63 percent to 51 percent as fatigue set in. Fuel related costs climbed from 32 to 49 percent and look like they are here to stay. But behind the numbers, she points to something she calls selective resilience. “It is a selective resilience story. She says, “People are still spending, but they are making sharper trade-offs around value, trust, convenience and relevance.”
That shift is not the real story though. The real story is what marketers do in response to it. She called it the downturn reflex, and she has watched it play out client after client. Comms get delayed. Research gets shelved. Innovation planning stalls. Marketing spend is the first thing cut. It is a known pattern. Here are the numbers to support this claim. Marketing Week’s Effectiveness Survey with Kantar found that 57.5 percent of marketers increased their focus on short term activity during the pandemic, and WARC data showed global ad spend fell 10.2 percent in 2020, a 63 billion dollar cut in a single year.
The problem, Rajaram argued, is that performance marketing looks efficient because clicks and conversions are easy to measure. But most potential buyers are not in the market at any given moment, and that pool shrinks further in a downturn. Chasing it exclusively means starving the very thing that creates tomorrow’s buyers. “This is the efficiency trap.”
The numbers back her up. Kantar’s LIFT ROI benchmarks across the Middle East and Africa show that 84 percent of sales are base sales, meaning they happen without any immediate advertising trigger. About 26 percentage points of those base sales are driven by brand equity. Kantar BrandZ data adds the payoff: brands with stronger equity hold up better in downturns and bounce back faster when confidence returns.
As Rajaram put it, “the question isn’t whether you can afford to invest in brand during a downturn, the question is whether you can afford not to.”
She built brand equity around two ideas, being meaningful and being different, with trust accelerating decision-making in complex environments. To illustrate, she points to Euro 2020, when Cristiano Ronaldo pushed aside two bottles of Coca Cola at a press conference in favor of water. Coca-Cola was widely reported to have seen a temporary decline in market value as a result. If she ran a water brand, she said, she would have leaned hard into that moment of borrowed authority.
On differentiation, she turned to AI. Kantar’s 2026 marketing trends data shows 24 percent of AI users already lean on an AI shopping assistant, a number climbing fast. Her advice: “Technology doesn’t buy things, people do.” But the brands that shape the story generative models tell about them will win the recommendation, while the rest get sorted out. “If you’re not the default recommendation you will be optimised out.”
Asked what brands should actually do right now, Rajaram kept it simple. Value no longer means cheap, she said. It means a bundle of price, service, convenience, trust and emotional fit. And staying relevant, she added, comes down to one job: building enough trust that your brand becomes meaningful to the people you want to reach.
Rajaram’s data suggests the brands that resist that reflex are the ones still standing, and growing, once everyone else has to come back and rebuild.
