Who typically makes marketing resource allocation expenditures decisionsand who really should?
Many marketing resource allocations are either made implicitly, without explicitly considering the tradeoffs, or are made by gut feel. For example, a marketing executive may see the advertising spending, product spending, and service spending as separate decisions, or may just guess as to how to spend, based on last year’s numbers, or what competitors appear to be doing. It’s time for marketing to make resource allocations in a more scientific way, pinpointing the expenditures that are likely to result in the best return on investment, based on sober quantitative analysis. There’s always room for managerial intuition, but right now intuition too often drives out objective analysis altogether. My friend, Kevin Clancy, of Copernicus Marketing Consulting, wrote a book called Counter-Intuitive Marketing, in which he demonstrates the horrible decisions that too many marketing managers are currently making, based on unsupported intuition. What is “customer equity” and how does it apply to br
