Interesting comment about Marketing

I was just reading an article on ZeroHedge (I was looking into their recent interest in the Baltic Dry -- clearly I now have lots of time to make up elsewhere as a result, what with the number of, mostly inane, comments over there... :-\ ) and I stumbled across one interesting comment, that I thought was worthy of note. I'll simply paste it below:

by Sudden Debt
on Mon, 01/03/2011 - 14:45
#844830

That shart looks like Titanic just sunk.

Another bleak forecast:

Since a few years, I've been watching the jobmarket pretty close and I've seen to have noticed a small trend indicator of the economy.

The jobmarket to watch is actually Marketing & Communication. Whenever bad new was being reported, a few months before that, Marketing jobs went away. At arround newyear last year, there where suddenly about 3 times more job offerings in marketing in just a matter of months. And those grew untill the summer.

Now suddenly, the number of Marketing jobs has bottomed to near zero. Actually I've never seen it that bad.

The reason why I mention this is because Marketing uses a 1 year forecast model linked on investments and growth forecasts.

And now I tend to believe that this years investment plans are going to hit rock bottom and sales might be facing for impact.

Normally Marketing expenditures are between 2 & 5% of the turnover. 2 starting from BtoB and 5% for retail.

So if a company starts hiring agressivly on all channels, they might be upon something big.

If you hear rumors about sacking them, it's bad.

These job numbers are now even lower then 2008!

(From this ZH article)