September 15, 2009 – IT vendor marketing budgets will decline by 8.3 percent for the full year 2009, according to a projection from the IDC CMO Advisory Practice. This marks the first decrease in year-on-year marketing spend since the dot-com bust of 2001-2002.
In IDC's latest survey of CMOs, more than 70 percent of senior marketers indicated that their marketing departments are experiencing "significant organizational change." IDC projects that 6,000 tech marketing jobs will be lost by the end of 2009. The job loss highlighted by IDC is a forecast for 2009 and comes from both private and public IT vendors across the hardware, software and services sectors.
Richard Vancil, vice president of IDC's Executive Advisory Group, observed that most marketing departments remain adequately funded, but many funds and activities aren't in the right place. “It's our observation that the best CMOs and marketing leaders are still making progress this year, and they are doing so through redirection and redeployment of existing budgets,” Vancil said in a statement. Such redirection includes moving money from product-line marketing to streamlined thematic campaigns and creating more shared services that remove redundancy in complex marketing organizations. Sales enablement has also been a major trend this year.
The 2009 recession is also causing significant organizational pressure on tech marketing and sales organizations. Vancil noted that the root cause of organizational change is the continued dysfunction between marketing and sales; where money is wasted and processes are sloppy. As a result, many organizations will create a more unified sales and marketing organization.
Julie Langenkamp is editor-in-chief of Information Management. She can be reached at julie.langenkamp@sourcemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter at @JulieLangenkamp.
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