Many big marketers are cutting back on ad spending this year … total measured ad spending for the first six months of ’09 has dropped 14.4% compared with the first six months of 2008.
But this is not how the companies that sell basic supermarket staples the American public purchases by the palletful are going about marketing in this recession.
For example, General Mills … is spending 16% more on marketing than it did in ’08. “In an environment where you have consumers going to the grocery store more often and thinking more about meals at home,we think that is a great environment for brand building, to remind consumers about our products.”
General Mills purveys homey comforts—Cheerios, Wheaties, Progresso Soup, Hamburger Helper. It does intensive research that aims at wreathing a kind of grandiosity of purpose around everyday products: “What is the bigger job this brand does in a consumer’s life?” This question is threaded through an exhaustive process—including videotaped interviews with key customers — that ultimately boils the marketing message of key brands down to simple story lines. For Hamburger Helper, it’s “One Pound. One Pan. One Happy Family.”
General Mills has long built evocative stories around simple products … believing that “marketing is a business in which the best story that’s most aggressively deployed wins”.
excerpted from Business Week, How General Mills’ Marketing Pays Off, July 16, 2009
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/09_30/b4140067532922.htm
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The Homa Files 
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