This New Yorker article has a lesson for all those marketers that subscribe to the idea that recessions are for hunkering down, battening the hatches, preserving assets and waiting it out. Two classic CPG brands, Post and Kellogg, did brand battle during the depression via the cutting-edge medium of the day: radio.
Who came out on top and remains there to this day? The brand that advertised their way out of the economic slump.
Via The New Yorker:

In the late nineteen-twenties, two companies—Kellogg and Post—dominated the market for packaged cereal. It was still a relatively new market: ready-to-eat cereal had been around for decades, but Americans didn’t see it as a real alternative to oatmeal or cream of wheat until the twenties. So, when the Depression hit, no one knew what would happen to consumer demand. Post did the predictable thing: it reined in expenses and cut back on advertising. But Kellogg doubled its ad budget, moved aggressively into radio advertising, and heavily pushed its new cereal, Rice Krispies. (Snap, Crackle, and Pop first appeared in the thirties.) By 1933, even as the economy cratered, Kellogg’s profits had risen almost thirty per cent and it had become what it remains today: the industry’s dominant player.