PM360 Product Manager Survey August 2011

MARKETING MASTER PLAN

Everything from how marketers spend their time to the size of this year’s budgets, and how marketers allocate the money they do receive.

Time Crunch
We asked brand managers how they spend their time at work…and how they wish they could spend it (Figure 15). The answers haven’t changed much in a year. Marketers still want to spend more time planning and executing, and less on administration and internal meetings.

As it is, respondents spend about a quarter of their time planning; they’d like to boost that to a third of the average workday. The same goes for executing tactics. On the other side of the time-is-money coin, internal meetings claim about one day out of every work week; if brand managers had their druthers, conference room limbo would drop from 21% to about 14%. Similarly, bureaucracy and administration eat up about 18% of their working lives; they’d like to slash that to 8%. They do not, however, grudge the time spent meeting with advertising agency and other external marketing support: at 12% of their work-month, it’s in the “Goldilocks Zone”: just right.

Expanding planning and execution doesn’t leave much left over from time reclaimed from paperwork and meetings.What there is of it, though, brand managers would like to invest in growth…for themselves and their staffs. Highest on the wish-I-could-do list (and by a wide margin) was spending more time with customers. Farther down the list were time for market research, forecasting, strategizing, and brainstorming…and training, for respondents and their junior colleagues.

Budget Worries
If it seems we’re all being asked to do more and more with less and less—well we are (Figure 16). The survey says that marketing budgets are steadily shifting towards the low end of the spectrum. The percentage of respondents reporting total marketing budgets of under $5 million per year has climbed steadily, from 29% in 2009 to 55% in 2011. The proportion of managers with $5-$10-million budgets has declined slightly (from 21% to 18%), but sharper dips have come in the larger budget baskets. In fact, the percentage of respondents reporting budgets in the highest category ($41-$100 million) has been cut in half since 2009, dropping from 18% to just 9%.

And they don’t think that the money that remains is enough to do the job. For the first time, a clear majority (60%) say that their marketing budget is not adequate to competitively market their brands (Figure 17). That’s a reversal from 2009, when 60% reported that their budgets were sufficient for the job, and it again reflects a steady erosion of resources.

Resource Allocation
Unsurprisingly, promotion budgets are moving towards electronic media (Figure 18).We’ve added categories, so apples-to-apples comparisons with previous years are difficult. Still, reading across the bar-graphs, we’re seeing continued strong focus on physician promotion… though now it’s spread across traditional personal promotion (off a little from 2010’s figures, because of the additional categories), e-detailing, CME and the Internet. DTC and DTP are flat, non-personal promotion is off just slightly (probably not significant), and Internet and social-media promotions are starting to tip the scales.

We looked for details on non-personal promotional spending (Figure 19). Internet promotion is, obviously, seeing most of the growth in here. Online efforts claimed an overall 59% of all non-personal spending (allocated to general Internet, e-marketing, e-detailing, and social media) in 2011, almost double the 2009 figure (34%) and up substantially from 2010 (45%).

E-marketing has climbed from 12% to 19% of non-personal spending, while e-detailing is rising even faster (though still smaller in total spending): e-detailing’s share rose from 5% in the 2010 survey to 13% this year. Old-school outreach is showing a bit of a rebound in 2011. Journal advertising rose to 19% from 2010’s 16% of non-personal dollars (but still down from the 26% reported in 2009). And direct mail crept up to 12% from last year’s 10%. Spending for dinner meetings, teleconferences, andWebinars, on the other hand, continues to drop, according to our sample—slipping steadily from 24% in 2009 to 16% this year.

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