Promotion 429
buying a pig in a poke from a magician. For a
dispassionate review of what is available, see
Chapter 8 of Broadbent (1997).
Objective-and-taskis widely treated as the
best option on the grounds that it is more
‘logical’: starting with objectives and calcu-
lating the cost of the tasks required to achieve
them, instead of starting with a sum of money
and then deciding what to do with it. However,
it does not follow that the means of achieving
the objectives will be obvious and the costs
unequivocal. Practical guides are apt to con-
clude with the exhortation to ‘estimate the
required expenditures’, a nasty sting in the tail.
Nevertheless, this procedure does force deci-
sion makers to be more rigorous in their
approach to an absolutely crucial task.
A collective weakness of all five methods is
their tendency to focus on short-term profit
maximization at the expense of long-term goals.
Indeed, the very convention of annual budget-
ing can in practice encourage strategically
questionable revision of existing promotional
campaigns. The admirable (and evidently effec-
tive) thematic continuity of BMW advertising in
Britain over a 25-year period, for example, is the
exception rather than the rule.
The practical usefulness of this worryingly
vague technology can be improved by treating
the contents of Table 17.2 as an `a la carte menu,
rather than table d’h ˆote. Any and all feasible
options can be chosen from it, a variety of
‘answers’ obtained, and executive judgement
applied to the task of deriving the best solution
from them. Survey evidence suggests that, on
average, two options are combined to arrive at
the amount to be spent on advertising. It
appears that no equivalent studies relating to
other ingredients of the promotional mix have
so far been published.
Three of the available appropriation-set-
ting methods have dominated practice over the
years. Data from a series of surveys over a
30-year period show that they are executive
judgement, the advertising-to-sales ratio and
the objective-and-task approach. Until the mid-
1980s, that was the rank order of popularity, to
judge by the average of all responses across the
surveyed samples. Since then, it has exactly
reversed, as a comprehensive transnational
survey first found (Synodinos et al., 1989). That
might be taken as an improvement, but for the
comments made earlier about the pitfalls of
applying the objective-and-task method in
practice.
It is lastly far from reassuring to report
that, in Britain, neither the second edition of a
handbook on ‘how to plan advertising’
(Cooper, 1997) nor a ‘guide to best practice’
from the Institute of Practitioners in Advertis-
ing (Butterfield, 1997) makes any mention at all
of appropriation-setting procedures, admirable
though both of them otherwise are. Further-
more, there seems to be no readily available
published discussion of available approaches to
the task in the context of the other elements of
the promotional mix.Deploying the promotional mix
Those responsible for the execution of promo-
tional strategy, faced by the choice of eight
broad means to achieve promotional objec-
tives, need a formal framework for deciding
which to use and which not, and how much
weight to give to each one chosen. An overall
constraint on choice will of course be imposed
by the funds appropriated for the purpose, the
subject of the previous section, and an influ-
ence inevitably exerted by the industry-wide
trends reported in the one before. Decision
makers will furthermore monitor the tactics of
their competitors, debating the relative merits
of head-to-head assaults versus outflanking
manoeuvres. Taking those factors as given,
Table 17.3 proposes seven other variables, in
the form of a checklist for cost-effective
deployment of the promotional mix. To illus-
trate how this template might be used in
practice to include or exclude available
options, consider its application to the case of
advertising a new cinema complex via large