Abstract:

I have taken you through our decision process by which we arrive at an advertising budget. On the way we have checked out the total business, developed the basic business strategy, supported the development of an appropriate marketing strategy, and come to a conclusion concerning our advertising and sales promotion expenditures. The most interesting part of this whole process is that it is easy to tie a recommendation for advertising back to an agreed upon marketing strategy which, in turn, is designed to increase the health of the business in certain specific ways, and that is the kind of language that general management understands, and those are the kind of recommendations that they are willing to back and budgets they usually approve.