Читать книгу Marketing Performance - Freundt Tjark - Страница 8

The outside-in perspective afforded by competitive benchmarking is helpful to give you a sense of the right magnitude of your marketing budget. Your budget level should be high enough to get noticed in the marketplace, but it should also reflect what you are trying to achieve as a company. Because of the differences in marketing strategy and overall business objectives, benchmarking alone is insufficient to determine the appropriate budget level. The high variation we see both in ad-to-sales ratios and positions on the SoS/SoM scatter plot testify to the fact that companies differ in their growth ambitions, in their short-term versus long-term orientation, in the scale effects they benefit or suffer from, and in the operational marketing objectives they pursue.

Your budget should take into account both your general strategic direction and your market share targets. Building on these foundations, you can define specific activities and estimate the funds required for each. Ranked according to typical budget need in ascending order, examples include:

• Ongoing support for an established brand

• Launch of a new model or product range

• Organic growth with existing products

• Brand extension – to a new category, for example

• Introduction of a new brand.

Put yourself in the shoes of a consumer goods executive. Assume you have set out to build a new non-food brand for the Chinese market. Once you have outlined the structure and the size of your target group (e.g., all female consumers in big cities aged 19 to 45) and quantified your perception and preference targets (e.g., 50 percent aided brand awareness and 25 percent purchase consideration), your media agency can help you calculate the required reach and investment – for example, by using utility models as pioneered by von Neumann and Morgenstern.12 Repeat this process for all the major marketing objectives you seek to achieve in a given year and sum up the individual investments to arrive at a total activity-based budget figure. To reduce complexity, you may want to go through this exercise brand by brand, country by country, or target segment by target segment, depending on the structure of your organization and the business priorities of your company.

In our experience, many companies will readily invest in highly visible above-the-line campaigns that drive awareness, but tend to neglect activities that drive purchase and loyalty. This is because such activities are often less spectacular than classical campaigns, and because they can be more cumbersome in terms of planning and steering. One consumer electronics company, for example, used to invest the bulk of their budget in classical media campaigns to promote their brand, partly spurred on by their creative agency that was desperate to win a Cannes Lion. But an analysis of consumer attitudes (see Chapter 3) revealed that lagging purchase consideration was actually the company's biggest issue. Subsequently, they included a range of activities in their marketing plan that would drive consideration, such as a new campaign featuring innovative products – rather than just the brand – and a set of activities targeting sales personnel at major electronics stores. In this case, the resulting budget was actually lower than before, but much more in tune with what the company needed to achieve in the marketplace to close the gap to its key competitor.