Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Your first question comes from the line of Kate McShane – Citigroup
Kate McShane – Citigroup
You mentioned that one of your strategies for 2009 is that you’re going to continue to invest in brand enhancing strategies and I know you’re not giving guidance for 2009 today but how should we think about marketing expense for next year. Can we expect the same level of investment as in 2008.
Jeffrey Swartz
I wouldn’t think about it in terms of dollars, I’d think about it in a same level of intensity. We have three things to sort. One is there are some big ideas that are being introduced for the first time in 2009, example is Mountain Athletic, example is the relaunch of women’s in Italy. There are other ideas like Earthkeepers which are already introduced that need to be reinforced and so one is there is a different pipeline of big ideas mostly in the fall of 2009.
Two is a marketing dollar in media is going farther obviously in 2009 then it did in 2008 and so we should be able to create similar levels of intensity with lower media spends. Literally you can buy television or media space cheaper as you know. The third thing is we said to you that we have contingent operating plans and what we mean by that is, all eyes right now are focused right now on two things.
One is executing the daylights out of a really challenging spring season, its as everybody reports it to be so its one pair at a time. The second thing that everybody is focused on is building the fall order book. We are travelling relentlessly into the face of our customers and having conversations about building a fall order book and we are certainly rating our market investments on the basis of what that order book will tell us.
We have a range of scenarios of what the order book will tell us and as a result what kind of marketing investments we’ll make. The point we were trying to make is we’re not going to back away from the strategy of rich ideas, deepen consumer insight that are aimed at important markets that are backed up with integrated marketing plans but we’re not [pureic] here, we’re very practical and so we’re going to build the most robust order book we can and then we’ll make judgments about the level of actual dollars that we spend in marketing on the basis of that order book.
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