Improving Marketing Productivity: Introducing the HAMRAT process

In a multi-brand organisation, the brands traditionally compete for resources in some degree of isolation, whether budgets are built top down or bottom up. This paper addresses a possibly growing demand for tools to allocate resources optimally across brands and/or markets. After reviewing the theory and some of the models available to UK practitioners, we develop a decision calculus model, called HAMRAT, that can be implemented within an Excel spreadsheet. The components of HAMRAT have been available in the public domain for many years but the fact that they are rarely used implies a need for their packaging into a convenient format that can be developed by practitioners or used to benchmark models offered by agencies or consultants. “The causes and effects [of advertising] have been analyzed until they are well understood. The correct methods of procedure have been proved and established. We know what is most effective, and we act on basic laws.”—Claude Hopkins (1922)