One of the perennial bug-bears of the marketing industry is the fact that it’s often seen by the bean counters as a cost to be cut in times of economic hardship, rather than an investment that will pay off when things pick up. And, according to the research of a top marketing professor who’ll be speaking in Hamilton on Friday March 30 as part of the Excellence in Practice seminar series offered by Corporate and Executive Education at Waikato Management School, billions of dollars of shareholder value are destroyed each year by companies that tie their marketing budgets to the business cycle.