Many companies have been thrown off course by the recession. Possibly that’s because they’re forgetting that, no matter how bad things get, we’ve been through all of this before. Other companies have more of a longitudinal perspective and can fall back on institutional memory and a reassuring sense of how the company has managed through previous downturns.

Of course, there’s no simple formula to brand longevity. But many marketers agree that the difference between iconic brands that succumb to an economic downturn and those that survive is the ability to maintain a long-term outlook and strategy. What sets apart such long-lasting, iconic brands as AT&T, Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus and AAA is their conviction to stay the course, irrespective of marketplace turmoil. Among them, these companies have more than 250 years of longevity, which has meant surviving countless up-and-down business cycles, partly because they didn’t cower in the corner waiting for the storm to pass.

In other words: Don’t hit the panic button. A company that panics right now is likely to take desperate measures that can hurt the brand’s identity. “A lot of companies are going overboard with frequent sales and advertising cuts,” says Michal Ann Strahilevitz, associate professor of marketing at Golden Gate University. These steps might sound like a good idea in the short-term, she says, but drastic reductions in advertising expenditures can hurt brand awareness. Strahilevitz says that marketers want their brand to be top of mind within their category and warns that “if your target audience doesn’t hear about you for awhile, they start to forget you and you may see this reflected in future sales.” As for offering products and services at previously unthinkable discounts, Strahilevitz says, “This can obviously be great for a quick spike in sales. However, because many consumers see price as an indication of quality, offering frequent deep discounts could affect your brand image. Prices paid today also influence consumers’ expectations about future prices, and that in turn means that today’s deep discount may end up eroding your future profit margins.”

To help you ensure that your company will be around for the long haul, we’ve amassed some sage advice from long-standing brands that have survived past downturns. Here, then, are their rules for making it through the storm.

Don’t cut spending

Ironic as it may seem, a recession is the worst possible time to make wholesale cuts to your marketing spend. That’s how Jeff Meyer feels. Meyer is a senior vice president at Feld Entertainment, an organization that includes the Ringling Bros. Circus. “Advertising continues to be of great importance for us,” he says. “We can’t cut back in today’s economy.” In many markets, he says, “we’re holding flat, and in opportunistic markets we’re actually spending more.”

One of the most important parts of Meyer’s efforts is direct mail. “We’re using mail now for the simple reason that the return on investment is measurable,” he says. “We know what we’re gonna get when we send out direct mail.” When Feld recently handled “Disney’s High School Musical: The Ice Tour,” Meyer tested the waters with a mail piece to his core customers. “The response to that mailing dictated how much money we spent on our advertising mix for the remainder of that engagement.”

For Meyer, what sets mail apart in any economy is its tangible nature, its ability to bring the events that Feld promotes to life. Which makes it more likely that one of the recipients will want to hold onto the piece, even tack it up on the fridge or a bulletin board. “There’s nothing more that we’d like,” says Meyer, “than to have a piece of our direct mail with a poster foldout on a child’s wall from one year to the next, and then replace it with a new one when our next show comes to town next year.”

Differentiate yourself from the competition

During the recessions of the early ’90s, the early 2000s and today, AAA’s brand strategy has remained the same: to strengthen the brand’s identity as a member-driven organization that stands for trust and safety. Rather than slashing its marketing budget or competing for members with price cuts, the organization looks for ways to remind its target audience of the AAA brand value. “In any recession, we just continue to do what we do best,” says Darlene Entringer, director of membership and brand marketing at AAA’s national office in Heathrow, Fla.

Thus, recent marketing efforts — like new smartphone applications that list AAA member discounts and an information-based campaign called AAA Seniors — reaffirm trust and safety as core brand values. They also promote additional long-term AAA goals like differentiating the brand in the marketplace, enhancing its relevance to consumers and diversifying its use of media.

As robust as AAA is right now, Entringer doesn’t mind pointing out that “AAA is starting to experience more competition than we’ve had to face in 107 years.” Some of the benefits AAA offers members, such as emergency roadside service, are becoming commoditized. Given the current economic climate, another brand might decide to shelve the task of differentiating itself — which is likely to tax marketing budgets in the short term — and focus instead on maintaining the bottom line. But for Entringer, differentiation is a priority these days.

In early 2009, AAA unveiled a new mobile phone application called AAA Discounts. The software allows smartphone users to identify nearby locations, such as restaurants and hotels, that honor AAA discounts. There have been nearly 350,000 downloads, and AAA clubs have just begun promoting the new product. Entringer is excited about the response so far and equally happy that the new product satisfies key long-term AAA branding goals. There are plenty of companies that offer roadside service, but few organizations can deliver the combination of services and products that AAA is continually building, says Entringer. The brand is setting itself apart from the competition by offering members the unique package of products and services.

Know your customer — even better

Pursuing long-term goals doesn’t mean ignoring current trends. One of AAA’s long-term goals is to enhance its relevance to members, and on some level that means responding to what’s happening now. “You want to take the issue of the day — what’s going on nationally — and bring it down to the individual. How is it affecting them at home?” says Yolanda Cade, managing director, AAA Public Relations. Marketers tend to scrimp on consumer relationships during tight financial times, mistakenly assuming that they can intuit what consumers are thinking. In the long term, this can weaken a brand’s relationship with its customers.

That’s a mistake that AAA is determined to avoid. The brand had a strong tradition of conducting focus groups prior to developing a new campaign. But at the start of 2008, when AAA was at the front end of a new campaign called AAA Seniors — targeting aging drivers — it decided to beef up its research practices. At a time when many brands might take a more fiscally conservative approach, AAA invested in additional layers of research, such as national polling and media audits, in order to better pinpoint members’ concerns and priorities.

What emerged from AAA’s research was that individuals who look after an elderly mother or father or aunt or uncle want to know more about how to broach the subject when driving becomes unsafe, as well as alternative modes of transportation that are available for the elderly in their cities and towns. The result is a AAA microsite that features in-depth information about when it’s time to have a chat with an elderly parent or grandparent about driving and how to negotiate those delicate conversations. The site also offers information about local public transportation options that would help elderly drivers avoid navigating poor road conditions on their own.

After establishing a pilot site in Phoenix and Miami, AAA launches the site nationally this July, targeting both seniors and caregivers. Cade says regional AAA clubs will have the option of using the campaign creative in a number of ways, including as direct mail flyers to reach seniors.

Shift dollars to the most effective channels

Again, cutting your marketing spend across the board could be disastrous, but that doesn’t mean you can’t make changes. John Nordberg, AVP of creative services for B-to-B at AT&T, says that his company relies on rigorous testing to make sure that the media mix, and the particular offers, are performing optimally for the company. “During tough times, you don’t want to cut your marketing activities,” he says. “You just need to be a little bit smarter about them.”

For example, Nordberg recently oversaw a campaign to win back customers who had defected to other services. “We mailed them a piece within a certain number of days or weeks after they had left us,” he says. “And we put a special offer in front of them to entice them to come back.” Nordberg employed a range of offers and a varied array of mail pieces. “We’ve done several different iterations of the win-back pieces,” he says. “Everything from postcards to self mailers to #10 envelopes.”

Based on the results, Nordberg and his staff have shifted their efforts to the pieces and offers that performed best. “We’re trying to create this learning database so that we can go back and say, ‘OK, what worked best for an offer that looks like this?’” he says. “You can run a campaign like that in five to 10 weeks, so you can run several of those campaigns every year. After each campaign, you sit down and evaluate what worked best so you can make adjustments and be back in the market with another creative piece within just a few weeks.”

The folks at AAA also adjust their media tactics during a recession. AAA regional clubs have their own marketing budgets and are responsible for promoting campaigns at the local level. “In better economic times, our club spends a larger portion of their budget on ‘brand marketing,’ or soft marketing,” says Alexandra Morehouse, senior vice president of brand experience for AAA of Northern California. The goal of this kind of marketing is strictly to boost awareness, typically through mass media advertising that builds an emotional connection but doesn’t necessarily offer a quantifiable return on marketing.

But when there’s pressure to conserve budgets during a recession, AAA of Northern California shifts dollars away from soft marketing in television and radio channels to direct response marketing. “During all three recent downturns we switched spend and emphasis to direct response media,” says Morehouse.

In the recession of the early ’90s, this meant more marketing dollars went to channels like direct mail and direct response TV. The recessions that have followed — the downturn of 2001 and today — have seen a steady increase in Internet-based direct response marketing at the Northern California club. Still, despite this increase, Morehouse says that “our highest-performing and most consistent channel is still direct mail.”

Ultimately, what distinguishes companies like AT&T, AAA and Feld Entertainment from the brands that fall victim to desperate, recession-driven measures is a combination of forward-thinking strategy and a commitment to proven best practices. And that combination will make it a lot more likely that these brands will remain part of the economic landscape for a long time to come.