Why a Bangkok Marketer Spent More While Rivals Cut Back

When the pandemic emptied marketing budgets across Southeast Asia in 2020, Anisha, the Bangkok-based CEO and director of Savant Marketing Solutions, told her clients to do the opposite of what everyone around them was doing. Cut nothing. Spend, if anything, more. "Great, nobody's advertising now," she recalled thinking on the Students Incorporated podcast, recorded in Bangkok with student hosts Premi and a guest co-host named Highlight. "So if you spend less dollars to advertise, you'd get to people more, because nobody dares to do that." It was a minority position inside her own client roster ("not everybody agreed," she said) and, according to nearly half a century of advertising research, the correct one.

The math behind the contrarian bet

Anisha's instinct has a paper trail. A McGraw-Hill study that tracked roughly 600 industrial companies through the 1981-82 U.S. recession found that firms that maintained or grew their ad spending through the downturn had sales, by 1985, that were 256 percent higher than firms that cut back, a gap wide enough that it's still cited by ad-effectiveness researchers more than four decades later. The pattern repeated in the cereal aisle during the 2008 financial crisis, when Kellogg's kept spending while rival Post pulled back and came out with a stronger share of the market. It repeated again during COVID: Procter & Gamble held its marketing budget steady while Coca-Cola pulled back, and, as Marketing Week's Mark Ritson wrote at the time, P&G's revenue climbed while Coke's slid. Peter Field's IPA-backed analysis "Winning or Losing" later formalized the pattern using effectiveness data going back decades, and separate research found that fewer than 30 percent of firms that slashed marketing budgets during a downturn ever recovered their pre-recession market position.

None of that was on the industry's mind in early 2020, when nearly nine in ten large multinationals reportedly deferred campaigns and more than half of marketers said they'd hold spending for six months or longer. Anisha was, in her own account, on the other side of that consensus, and she frames her reasoning less as bravado than as a read on scarcity. With most competitors gone quiet, the same ad dollar reached further. Clients who followed her into that gap, she said, came out of the pandemic better positioned than the ones who went dark and then scrambled to rebuild attention once the market reopened.

From the PR floor at Leo Burnett to running her own shop

Anisha's confidence in that call traces back to a marketing career that started, by her own telling, in a hotel basement doing cold-call telemarketing, a job she took, she said, before she was technically old enough to have it. From there she moved through internships in photography and event production (she was, at one point, an official photographer for MTV Magazine) before landing her first real marketing job in the PR department at Leo Burnett, the global advertising agency. She didn't stay in PR long. "I would do the work and then I would come down and hang out with the strategy guys," she said, and within a few years she'd moved through event production and into the earliest wave of digital marketing. She dates the shift to roughly 2009, when agencies were still charging clients hundreds of thousands of baht just to run an email marketing program, back when "EDM," in her industry's shorthand, meant "email database mailing," not a music genre.

By her account, she started her own practice, Savant, halfway through an MBA she was pursuing near Boston, at Clark University, commuting between client calls and coursework badly enough, she said, that she barely slept for a year. That range, PR, events, email, social, strategy, is what she says now lets her see patterns other specialists miss: a tactic that's old news in one industry, she said, often reads as breakthrough innovation the moment it's ported into another.

A 60-year-old brand whose customers were disappearing

The COVID story wasn't the only place Anisha's instinct for reading a market's real condition, rather than its recent sales numbers, showed up. She described (without naming the client, citing confidentiality) a clothing brand that had stopped marketing for roughly 30 years because sales were strong enough that leadership saw no need. The flaw in that logic surfaced slowly, then all at once: the loyal customers who'd kept the brand profitable were aging out of the market. "Some of them no longer exist," she said. "Literally." The rebrand her firm built to reach a new generation took over a year to launch and, by her account, another 14 to 15 months after that before results started to compound.

It's a version of a problem playing out across the retail industry right now. Fast Company's 2025 roundup of heritage brands finding new relevance singled out Burberry's turnaround under CEO Joshua Schulman, who leaned back into the brand's original identity, weatherproof British outerwear, rather than chasing trend cycles, and Bath & Body Works, a brand once associated with mall culture in the 1990s, which repositioned quickly enough around scent trends to become, per industry coverage, Gen Z's top fragrance brand. Canada Goose took a similar bet in 2024, naming designer Haider Ackermann its first-ever creative director to pull a nearly 70-year-old outerwear brand into high fashion. The common thread across all of them, and across Anisha's anonymized case, is the same: a legacy brand's existing customer base is a lagging indicator, not a safety net, and waiting until the gap is visible in the sales numbers means starting the rebuild a generation late.

Don't try to out-shout Coca-Cola

That same patience shapes Anisha's advice to small businesses and student entrepreneurs, a recurring audience for a show produced by high schoolers at the International Community School of Bangkok. Her first rule: a small brand that tries to advertise like a global one will burn through a year's budget in weeks and land in debt. Her prescribed sequence instead starts with free channels, she named TikTok and YouTube specifically, precisely because a constrained budget forces a kind of creative discipline that paid media doesn't. Only once a brand has proven it can build an audience without spending, in her framing, does it make sense to start layering in paid acquisition against a known return.

"Our brains, we're still Neanderthals. We're still cavemen."

The technology changes; the person on the other end doesn't

That line, delivered half as a joke, was Anisha's answer to a student host's question about staying current in an industry that reinvents its tools every few years. Her point: whatever platform or format is dominant this year, the person receiving the message is running on emotional wiring that hasn't changed much since before recorded history, and marketers who chase tools instead of psychology are optimizing the wrong variable.

She raised one place where the tool gap is real, though: language. Asked about omnichannel marketing, she noted that AI adoption in Thai-language markets was lagging meaningfully behind English-language ones, by her estimate, 70 to 80 percent behind. That's consistent with outside research. A Columbia Business School analysis found that companies headquartered in non-English-speaking countries are roughly 12 percent less likely to adopt AI tools, a gap researchers there attribute less to cost than to which markets AI vendors build and market for in the first place, since investor pressure pushes most AI startups toward English-speaking markets first. Separate research on large language models found that even relatively well-resourced languages like Spanish, French, and German see models perform 5 to 8 percent worse than they do in English, with far larger gaps for languages that get less investment. For Anisha, that gap isn't an argument against the tools; it's one more version of the same lesson underlying her whole career: the platform is never the point. Knowing who's actually on the other end of it is.

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