It shouldn’t be a surprise that as the economy continues to tank businesses continue to slash their marketing budgets.

Their cuts aren’t necessarily due to their lack of confidence in the economy but more so in the actual downturn in their own sales. This occurs because their marketing budgets are directly tied to their sales revenue in a lock step fashion: Slaes go up, marketing budgets increase; Sales go down, so does the marketing.

Now, we’ve all read the studies about communication during a recession. Those who maintain, or dare we say even increase, their marketing efforts will benefit from an increased share of voice in their sector. The thinking is that as the economy slows and some marketers become gun shy, it becomes increasingly easier for other marketers to capture a larger piece of the pie. Sounds good in theory, right? There is certainly support of this thinking by way of a few white papers floating around out there as well as reports based on analysis of actual marketing activities during recessions of the past.

Armed with this information it is easy to sit back and preach to clients about how they should maintain or even add funds to their annual budget. How they should dig up incremental funds by sacrificing other expenses in order to defy their logic of ad spend correlated to how their sales are pacing for the period. If you were sitting in the client’s shoes how would you take that suggestion. Yeah, I thought so.

Aligning budgets to sales will trap a business into a reactionary system, one that puts the business at the mercy of outside forces. The conversation that should take place is not about adding incremental budgets but one about changing the entire budget allocation paradigm. A viable alternative is to utilize an objectives or acquisition based model where budgets are funded around goals established by the business plan.

If a company desires to sell X units in 2009, a formula can be designed to establish a basis of how much it will cost to acquire the conversion of a sale. By using a budget per unit, a company should be able to fund a marketing strategy that is more proactive in the face of a weak economy as well as a healthy one.