Investments in tobacco brand: development of assesment methods

<p>The topic of tobacco brand investments effectiveness as well as any other brand is of great importance to brand managers in the marketing departments of th relevant companies. Assessment of brand managers work quality lets financial officers to optimize financial flows inside the enterprise, enhancing its financial results. It is of significant importance in the tobacco industry taking in account all recent restrictive initiatives coming from the government, especially from the Ministry of Healthcare of Russian Federation. This significance is the main reason behind this paper.</p><p>Tobacco industry has been chosen due to the high level of<br /><a href="http://www.multitran.ru/c/m.exe?t=1846143_1_2&amp;s1=%E3%EE%EC%EE%E3%E5%ED%ED%EE%F1%F2%FC">homogeneity</a> of physical attributes of products on this market and the low elasticity of demand, which comes from the addiction caused by tobacco. Synergy of these factors creates the unique atmosphere of transparency of marketing activities, due to high level of importance of branding factors for the customer.</p><p>The development of the method of tobacco brand investments effectiveness assessment has been attempted in this article. The aim was to make it as simple for the brand manager to use it as possible. The idea of the method is based on the fact that every customer has his own brand image, thus has the different acknowledgment of the effort towards its enhancement. Two groups of customers have been distinguished &ndash; smokers and non smokers. Both of them are affected by the efforts of marketing experts. Apart from that brand has also been separated to different brand elements (name, design of the pack, etc). Separately the levels of importance of those elements have been found for smokers and non smokers respectively. The formula of assessment has been developed that can indicate the effective investments &ndash; to all investments ratio.&nbsp;</p><p>This method can be a useful tool of brand manager in everyday use as it is simple to use and gives a chance to comprehend the effectiveness of different investments in tobacco brand, which lets financial officers optimize marketing budgets of companies.&nbsp;</p>