I’m sure I’ll say many times in this series that you need to take the idea that people actually said these things with a pinch of salt. This quote on advertising has been (very dubiously) attributed to Henry Ford.

“A man who stops advertising to save money is like a man who stops the clock to save time.”

He’s saying stopping advertising (or we could say marketing) doesn’t save money. Or, in reality, stopping marketing and advertising dos save money in the short-term but you disappear, lose sales and go bust.

And yet cutting marketing is one of the first lever’s pulled when money is tight.

If you want something more statistical, take a look at “The Long And The Short Of It” by Binet and Field or Ehrenberg-Bass’ 2021 work on the effects of cutting advertising.