McBride & Associates: Marketing Communication Sourcing

Bridging the Gap

Strategic Sourcing has become an accepted practice to control costs and improve profitability in manufacturing and administrative areas. But only a few companies have extended these same disciplines to their marketing programs. And that's where considerable leverage can be found.

However to exploit this opportunity, it means that the Sourcing Staff must have some involvement in defining requirements, selecting suppliers, negotiating costs and evaluating the vendor's performance after the fact. Responsibilities many marketing managers resist sharing.

We can help to overcome this resistance by providing both parties with a better understanding of what, and where, the opportunities are for the supply management staff to make significant contributions without usurping the role or responsibilities of the marketing managers.

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Our experiences have shown that a knowledgeable external expert can put manufacturers on an equal footing with agencies and marcom vendors during negotiation. This is important because Agencies can be very adept at dividing and conquering their clients.

The chart below illustrates the sort of framework that we use to help assess the potential benefits of additional scrutiny being given to the four major areas of marcom expenditures. The benefits of rigorous spending analysis are universal and well-understood, even when not well practiced. However the benefits in the other three areas will vary from market to market and company to company. Identifying and categorizing them is the first step toward more effective sourcing and supply management.

Gray Paper on Sourcing

Information Request

Recently we published a 21 page paper on the subject of Marketing Communication Supply Management.

Some of the subjects covered:

Basis for Trust-Based Relationships
Framework for Sourcing Interventions
Media Buying, Auditing and Clout
Agency Operating Cost Breakdown
Truth in Agency Accounting
Agency Cost Benchmarks.

You may download a copy of the gray Paper on Marcom Sourcing here.Other papers we have published on Agency Compensation, Agency Performance Appraisals and Agency Search & Selection ican be found in the Ideas section.