Read this before reallocating any marketing spend
Summary
But to preemptively freeze all marketing based on an incorrect understanding of its purpose or what it will cost you down the road – or even worse, to simply start doing less of what you were doing before COVID-19 without any strategic adjustment – would be a huge mistake. This led to backlash, and some really scary social media rants like this one (a lot of people thought this was a parody, but it wasn’t): To Airbnb’s credit, they have since taken measures to help their hosts and ride out the pandemic by among other things: But Airbnb also cut its entire marketing budget for the rest of 2020 in a bid to save $800 million, and that’s problematic for two reasons. And here is the graphic accompanying one of several emails I received in my inbox from Delta Airlines, signed and allegedly penned by CEO Ed Bastian: The crazy thing is that Airbnb will probably be OK. Brian Chesky is a branding genius, and the fact that he was able to grow a startup that was once posting “air mattress” accommodations into a household name is remarkable. If you happen to be an internationally recognized brand that was experiencing extraordinary growth before this all went down (and just received $1 billion in private equity funds) then maybe (a lower valuation and some lost market share notwithstanding). A few weeks after announcing it was abandoning all marketing, the company launched a new “Online Experiences” page that lets customers pay hosts for virtual tourism sessions.