The End of Averages for Marketing Budgets

Marketers have long benchmarked their budgets against their peers’ spending. But it’s time to seek better metrics than the average budget.

Nader Tavassoli and Christine Moorman

November 16, 2023

In his 2015 book The End of Average, Todd Rose warns against “averagarians” designing systems based on the mean or judging success in terms of the deviation from the mean. He highlights Gilbert Daniels, an anti-averager hero, whose research in the 1950s led the U.S. Air Force to design planes with personalized cockpit features to suit pilots of all shapes and sizes rather than just the average male pilot — an innovation that dramatically increased safety records.

Marketing strategy also hinges on the principle ...