Last week, IREP presented the figures for the advertising market in 2016: zero growth, nothing to be proud of! For 2017, we can hope for... nothing better: election years are not favourable in this respect.
Has French industry recovered badly from the 2008 crisis? There's no excuse not to invest!
At the end of 2016, the WARC was a little more optimistic, with a modest +0.8% for 2017 for our country - compared with +4.3% in the UK, and even +1.8% in Germany.
The same applies to R&D spending, as Eurostat points out: in 2015, French R&D spending reached a ceiling of 2.2% of GDP, a far cry from Korea (4.3%) or Japan (3.6).
And yet innovation is vital in a changing world. Why is there so much reluctance to innovate? Certainly because too many companies are run by financiers, with their eyes riveted on the share price; and when the economic climate turns out to be gloomy, the only way to maintain the share price and pay out substantial dividends is to cut ... superfluous expenditure.
Superfluous meaning - again for financiers - everything that is not strictly necessary for the smooth running of the company in the very short term: marketing, advertising, research and development, etc.
In so doing, we are robbing companies of their future, with brands that have a poor image and products that lag behind in the face of fierce global competition; we are also discouraging the vital forces that prefer to join the best students in the market.
If INSEE and Ofce are to be believed, the economic situation seems to be improving: at last! Perhaps the financial community will loosen its purse strings a little and allow some advertising and R&D investment.
But there's no doubt that in a year's time, they'll be calling us to account: how our brand image hasn't recovered; how our products aren't at the cutting edge of technology? "See, there's no point wasting shareholders' money like this"..
A brand image is built up over the long term, and the development of new technological building blocks takes years: how can our poor French marketers really compete with Korean or Japanese companies who have 20 or 30 year strategic plans, when their own horizon does not go beyond the end of the year.
