How a marketer’s budget is set is often doomed to fail, Pet Circle CMO Jon Wild says. Typically, it stems from a business’s growth target. “There’s an arbitrary increase to marketing spend and you’re told to go hit the target. Typically, you fall short in the first quarter, and it’s death by a thousand cuts for the remainder of the year.” That method is “set up for failure”, he says. Rather, growth should be function of the whole company – with marketing being one factor – working towards those targets. Budgets and spend is the last of eight steps detailed in a new book from Atomic 212°'s James Dixon and Claire Fenner on how to build an Effective Media System. “The place we want to get to is where we know for every dollar we spend on media, what we’re going to get back out,” Dixon says. Download here.
