A Lesson for Economists from Marketers Regarding Stimulus Bill

The stimulus package in recent days has come under more scrutiny for its jumbled contents than for its colossal size. President Obama said it himself; there is no silver bullet that’s going to fix the economy. That’s the problem with economics—it’s not a science. You have to arrive at solutions though intuition and a lot of iteration. What else does that sound like? Marketing.

Marketers have a huge number of tools in our toolbox just as economists do. We use Advertising, Public Relations, Direct, Outdoor, Online, Mobile, Broadcast, Print, etc. while our economic counterparts can use (with legislative approval) bonuses, interest rates, bailouts, tax cuts, spending, earmarks, etc.

What’s true for marketing is also true for economics—they are not sciences. In either case, you can’t test your hypothesis under controlled circumstances so that means a whole-lota-guessing and measuring.

Unlike economists, when marketers approach a campaign with specific objectives, the goal is to maximize the budget effectiveness by spreading it wide enough to cover all necessary bases, while narrow enough so the marketing investment is substantial enough to have a positive impact.

The proposed stimulus bill (or bills) is spreading the budget in much the same way a marketing campaign would. What marketers do well and economists do rarely however is carefully measure the effectiveness of each of the tools utilized. When a tool is found to be highly effective, marketers supplement its budget. When a different tool is found ineffective its budget is cut back.

Regardless of the form of the final approved stimulus bill, I hope our country’s economists will closely measure each and every penny spent as part of this stimulus to see where our tax dollars are or are not effective and act accordingly.

In the end, I hope they’ll be held as accountable as we, marketers, are. But I won’t hold my breath.