Know-How Exchange : Strategy

Come on. What would you possibly do with that information, even if someone came up with an answer?

Suppose I told you that the average was $125,000. What would that tell you? There could be a whole bunch under $25,000 and a few at $50 million+.

You'll have to tell us what you REALLY want to know before we can give you anything that could possibly be helpful.

Look at this recent thread about a similar question here on the forum.

"What do I budget?" is asked here over and over again. That thread has some good answers, as well as links to earlier postings.

Mgoodman and SRyan really do make the most sense. The rest is conjecture and any answer is irrelevant to the world of marketing.

As I’ve got a background in high level stats due to a misspent childhood spent doing quantum mechanics, statistical thermodynamics and mathematical chaos theory, I can tell you that it’s arguable that there isn’t an average.

Any figure you could infer from surveys would be rather like the perturbation problem expounded by Bohr when he was falling out with Einstein (The EPR theory if you want to read it) that when you try to examine variable A through looking at it from standpoint B, you screw up the position of B, such that your measurement of A is up the spout. Heisenberg helped and Schroedinger solved it at atomic level by postulating closed systems of Eigenvectors, but whose going to use that to calculate your $$ spend on advertising ball bearings?

Thus the plethora of unpublished marketing budgets from small firms which have to be guessed at and interpolated from the fibs they tell in the surveys their office trainees fill in whilst whiling away their days, swamp the results from the few firms which bother to give an answer to a question they know is of no use to anyone.

As to the largest advertising spend? As a % of GDP, it was probably Leonid Brezhnev in his campaign to market the Soviet Union as the world’s most desirable and cuddly super-power. The invasion of Afghanistan alone cost $23Billion, failed and it helped to bring down the whole caboodle. Not even IBM managed to match that in trying to market “Big Blue” against the inexorable rise of the PC or the American Car industry in its ill fated attempt to persuade Europeans that it could make cars which would actually go round corners.

Most of the biggest marketing spends have been failures. There’s a lesson to be learned there. And no one has tried to attribute any value whatsoever to the average cost of a failed marketing campaign. I wonder why?


Good luck

Steve Alker
Unimax Solutions