And the very first problem you will be facing is finding a dissertation topic. This article will surely help you define a dissertation topic question so that you can start writing your dissertation in marketing as quickly as possible. More precisely we will be looking into: marketing and the recession. I will try to link these too together.

For writing your university dissertation I would definitely suggest trying to narrow down your marketing dissertation topic and focus on one type of marketing. For example, if you wanted to talk about direct marketing and specifically direct mail, you could make a correlation to the US Post Office which had the largest rate increase for direct mailers in the beginning of 2008. They also recently have requested the government to allow them to switch from delivering 6 days per week to 5 (Mon-Fri, cutting out Sat.) as well asking for financial assistance to pay for employees benefits among other things. The relationship between direct mail marketing and the post office suffering from the recession could lead to a number of discussions such as:

ü       Has a decrease in direct mail by marketers (which has always been expensive) caused the post office to raise their rates or did the rate increase cause marketers to decrease their direct mail volume?

ü       How the rate increase in direct mail has caused marketers to look for alternative ways to promote their business such as email and social media which are less expensive.

ü       What the effects of the recession and the post office increase have on marketers and their response rates now that many are gearing away from their dependency on direct mail, which has consistently had the highest response rate. Are lower cost promotions yielding the same benefits and is the ROI equivalent?

Just some thoughts. You could probably talk about any of these without mention of the post office changes as well.

It will always be helpful to make a result/actionable output from your marketing dissertation. If you can come up with a solution as well, reflecting an optimistic perspective on Depression, it would be relevant to the faculty as well.

In that context, you could look at the following options:

1.       Do specific analysis for consumer segments (impact based on demographics & psychographics), change in their needs / wants, the impact of the environment, and additional segments that have been created due to the economic environment

2.       You can also look at, as mentioned above, change in the marketing approaches (addressing insecurities or encouraging spending), and innovation in ATL/BTL activities due to recession

3.       Do a market analysis of what is the ideal portfolio across different product categories / items to be marketed during recession and the specific approaches for the same.

These are some of the alternative areas worth exploring in your dissertation paper.