CHAPTER 9
BUDGET PRIORITIZATION
In Chapter 8 (“Budget Sizing: The Million-dollar Question”) we looked at how to create budget transparency and how to size the budget according to the marketing objectives, business opportunities, and competitive benchmarks. In this chapter, we introduce proven approaches and tools for allocating the budget to the various spending units.
The chapter is designed to answer key questions about allocation:
- How much should you spend on a given country, region, or store – and why?
- How granular does the allocation logic need to be?
- How do you account for unforeseen events?
The chapter addresses such topics as whether to make decisions centrally or locally, how to define the right size of units for your investments, and how to create transparency. To help retailers derive or optimize their actual budget split, we also discuss the definition of allocation criteria, criteria weights, and spending thresholds.
Find the right decision mode: deciding centrally or convincing locally
Many retailers plan their marketing activities by reviewing their activity plans from previous years and then applying adjustments to the plan to account for any changes that have taken place in the intervening period. The types of change that can warrant such an adjustment include competitors’ moves, new insights from market research, fresh input from media agencies regarding media trends – or simply changes in costs for specific activities.
Our experience ...
Get Retail Marketing and Branding: A Definitive Guide to Maximizing ROI, 2nd Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
