QUALITATIVE RESERRCH: Setting Advertising and Promotion Budgets in Multi-Brand Companies
研究了多品牌公司中品牌经理如何分配广告和促销预算，通过21次深度访谈总结出保护广告支出的最佳实践，如容忍不确定性、基于前瞻目标分配资金等。
Despite the best efforts of brand managers in packaged-goods companies, strategic advertising and sales promotion spending decisions are frequently subject to organizational realities such as power, politics, and fourth-quarter (or mid-year) budget cuts. In many companies, budget allocation decisions are subject to competing pressures: long.tenn objectives versus short-term needs, risk versus reward trade-offs, personal career success versus what's best for the company, and so forth. Oftentimes, significantly greater sums are allocated to sales promotion than to advertising-to the detriment of the long-term competitive position of the brand's image. This study examines the decision-making process brand managers use to set and allocate advertising and sales promotion expenditures for individual brands. with the objective of improving the process. We report the results of 21 depth interviews, highlighting the "best practices" of companies that are proactively coping with budgeting pressures, and offer suggestions on how to protect-and even increase, where warranted-advertising spending. For example, the companies in our study indicate that protecting advertising spending is more likely to happen when they:Tolerate the uncertainty associated with advertising spending.Allocate funds based on forward-looking objectives (rather than historical precedent).Use more experienced brand managers who can balance marketing research information with intuition.Remain focused on brand equity.These and other suggestions to help managers improve their marketing communications budgeting decisions are discussed.