Marketing provides a tangible opportunity for cost
savings, but few companies have found a way to increase
the function's purchasing efficiency. To gain the
maximum benefit to their bottom lines and marketing
efforts, companies will have to ensure that marketing
and procurement departments collaborate to an
unprecedented degree. There are four steps that
companies can take to begin the process of managing
their marketing dollars more efficiently: Analyze
marketing spending in detail; adopt a more rigorous
approach to spending; deploy decision support tools to
end-users; and create a clear delineation of roles and
responsibilities. pdf 2009
