Advertising spending patterns and competitor impact

In most industries, brand managers do not advertise continuously. Instead, advertising is switched on and off systematically, a phenomenon often referred to as pulsing. Moreover, spending levels vary considerably across periods when brands do advertise. Surprisingly, this variety in advertising spending patterns as observed in practice, as well as competitor impact on these patterns and their sales outcomes, have received relatively little empirical attention. In this paper we focus on two core aspects of observed advertising patterns: incidence and magnitude. Insights are based on the analysis of advertising spending for 370 CPG brands in 71 product categories over a four-year period. We also collected feedback from practitioners dealing with advertising across a wide range of firms. We first empirically establish that pulsing is the dominant form of advertising scheduling. Observed patterns, in turn, are largely driven by television and print advertising. Next, we show that, after accounting for a wide range of other possible drivers, advertising in-sync with competitors is more common than out-of-sync. However, the results suggest that competitive reasoning plays only a relatively minor role in advertising decisions. Finally, we show that, across a wide range of real-world scenarios, investing in top-of-mind awareness through maintenance advertising insulates brands from competitors' actions and boosts sales

Advertising Budget And Sales Paths Under The Dynamics Of The Student Work Control Problem And Regularity Requirements

Consider a firm promoting a product in a fast expanding industry by using advertising as its single promotional tool. The firm\u27s objective is to minimize the overall cost of advertising necessary for reaching certain target sales of the product by the end of a given planning period. We adopt the Student Work Control problem (SWC) framework for modeling this marketing context, in general, and the advertising-sales response function, in particular. We compare the SWC\u27s optimal control budgeting principle with the solutions of equally effective, alternative advertising budgeting principles, which require strong regularity conditions on the path of either the advertising outlays or sales. In contrast to the other principles, SWC\u27s optimal sales path is highly convex to the point that the firm may deliberately accept decreasing sales at the earliest periods. However, its optimal solution requires the firm to advertise in every period and to continue to accelerate its advertising outlays. The resulting Advertising Sales Response function, too, may therefore have a convex section with declining sales, a finding contributing to an optimization-driven explanation of threshold in advertising effect on sale

Retailer and Manufacturer Advertising Scheduling in a Marketing Channel

Producción CientíficaDespite the fact that the use of sporadic advertising schedules is well established in both the advertising literature and market place, the marketing channel literature that focuses on vertical interactions has consistently prescribed continuous advertising strategies over time. This paper investigates, in a bilateral monopoly context a situation in which a manufacturer and a retailer control their pricing and advertising decisions, the optimal scheduling of advertising in a planning horizon of three periods. We found that, consistent with the advertising literature, the integrated channel adopts pulsing to benefit from advertising positive carryover effects. Conversely, when pricing and advertising decisions are uncoordinated, channel members can optimally implement each of the following three advertising schedules. The full continuous schedule where channel members advertise in the three periods. %The full pulsing schedule in which the two channel members advertise only in the first and third periods. The mix schedule where the retailer advertises in the three periods and the manufacturer advertises exclusively in the first and third periods. Depending on the magnitude of the long-term effects of retailer and manufacturer advertising, each of the three schedules can be implemented.The first author's research is partially supported by MEC under project ECO2014-52343-P, co-financed by FEDER funds and the COST Action IS1104 "The EU in the new economic complexgeography: models, tools and policy evaluation

An examination of the interfaces between operations and advertising strategies

This dissertation is composed of three journals examining the interfaces between the marketing variable of advertising and various aspects of the operations function of the enterprise, namely, (1) production cost [Chapter 2], (2) inventory control [Chapter 3], and (3) service cost learning [Chapter 4]. The first journal identified the optimum advertising allocation policy over time in the presence of a quadratic convex/concave production cost function when the advertising response function is concave using a modified Vidale-Wolfe model. Through analytical proofs and numerical simulations, the results indicated the potential superiority of a pulsation policy in the presence of concavity in the advertising response function only if the production cost function is convex; otherwise, the uniform policy would be optimal. The study is seen as applicable to frequently purchased products in the maturity stage of their life cycles of dominant firms in their industries practicing a zero-inventory policy in a just-in-time environment. The research objective pertaining to the second journal was to study how a firm would adapt optimum ordered quantity/production lot size and optimum advertising expenditure in response to changes in its own parameters, rival\u27s parameters, or parameters that are common to all firms in a symmetric duopoly/oligopoly market. This was accomplished by developing comparative statics (sensitivity analysis) of a symmetric competitive inventory model with advertising-dependent demand based on a market share attraction model. Both optimum advertising expenditure and ordered quantity were found to be sensitive to changes in marketing and operations parameters. The robustness of the symmetric comparative statics was assessed by using data from the brewing industry in the US that represents an asymmetric oligopoly. The empirical analysis indicated that the theoretical results obtained for a symmetric oligopoly remained valid for an oligopoly where each firm had a market share less than 50% and the market shares were further apart from one another. The study is thought to be applicable to low-priced frequently purchased consumer items in competitive mature markets. In the third journal, the original Bass model for new products was modified to incorporate advertising and customers\u27 disadoption to characterize the optimum advertising policy over time for subscriber service innovations where service cost follows a learning curve. After characterizing the optimal policy for a general diffusion model, the results pertaining to a specific diffusion model for which advertising affects the coefficient of innovation were reported. On the empirical side, four alternative diffusion models were estimated and their predictive powers, using a one-step-ahead forecasting procedure, were compared. Empirical research findings suggest that the specific diffusion model considered in this study is not only of theoretical appeal, but also of notable empirical relevance. Taken together, the analytical and empirical findings argue in favor of advertising more heavily during the early stage of the diffusion process of the new subscriber service innovation and including a related message that would predominantly target innovators. Furthermore, it might be inappropriate to model the diffusion of subscriber services as if they were durable goods. The study is thought to be applicable to service innovations that are made available to customers periodically at a subscription fee. Typical examples include, but are not limited to, cable TV, health clubs, pest control, and the internet