Marketing Manager

The task approach requires advanced planning for budgeting marketing promotions because it is strictly goal-oriented. After a business conducts a wide array of market research, they set the marketing objectives and cost of promotions figures. The process involves defining the goals that the promotional mix is intended to accomplish, and then determining the amount and types of activity required to reach each one of the objectives (commercials, sales promotions, etc.) The toughest challenge with the task approach is determining the costs of reaching each objective to develop an accurate budget.

With the task method, competitor's promotions spending levels may or may not be ignored. This depends on the size of the firm and if they can afford to conduct promotions in line with their competitors'. An example would be smaller firms who are newer to a market and may not have a large promotions budget to start out operations. They may not have the financial resources to compete on the same promotions level as their competitors' at first, even if they wanted to.

The defined objectives of the firm must also be considered. If they have an objective to increase sales revenue by 5% in a given year, this may be achieved by a number of methods. They may decide to mirror their competitor's promotion spending levels, with the intention that their promotions will attract customers away from its competitors. Or, they may choose to gain the added revenue in other ways, such as marketing new products which its competitors do not. In this scenario, they would have no real incentive to match its' competitors spending levels, since there's no real competition with that particular product.