This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. For several years now, marketers have been urged to embrace one-to-one marketing and to offer micro-segmented consumers customized products and services through targeted outreach. While the "market of one" approach can pay off, say the authors, it requires a significant upfront investment, including: implementing customer relationship management software applications; filtering, enhancing, and cleaning customer data; and personalizing interactions (e-mail, billing, offers, and so on). These activities take time and the coordination of multiple parts of the organization (marketing, customer service, sales, information technology), which can be daunting for companies trying to react quickly to a changing environment. In addition, those systems have often produced disappointing results because their use was not well integrated with corporate strategy. Also, micro-marketing strategy, on its own, is too narrow. Companies still need to reach broad groups of people with messages that are not dependent on an individual's decision to open an envelope (whether virtual or physical), pick up the phone, or click on a box. But broad-based, broadcast media is ineffective and expensive. Fortunately, there are alternative solutions, such as one-to-one targeting and the broadcasting of 30-second television spots. The author's research on trends in marketing spending and consumer attitudes about advertising reveals four strategies available to companies that want to reach broad groups of people without breaking their marketing budget. The strategies are liberally illustrated with examples from Nike, Microsoft, UBS, Delta, Sony, Procter & Gamble, Citibank, Nextel, Honda, Nokia, and McDonald's, among others.

Companies selling multiple products in multiple territories face the difficult question of how to allocate marketing resources. But comparing the profit potential of, say, razors in Germany with batteries in the United Kingdom is a difficult analytical task that demands reams of data. Finding the optimal answer is only half the battle. The rest involves the political and organizational challenge of shifting the money around. One company, Samsung, overcame these challenges by using hard data, not intuition, to allocate its marketing dollars. Marketing executives undertook an intensive 18-month project to gather diverse and detailed information about more than 400 possible product-category and country combinations. It collected all that data in a single, easy-to-access site and used the software's analytical power to predict the impact of different allocation scenarios. Such what-if testing enables management to find the budget allocation that will yield the highest total marketing ROI. Samsung also worked to anticipate and defuse organizational resistance to change.