ABSTRACT
Known as the marketing era, the 1960s is the defining decade when the American corporation evolves from the earlier manufacturing/functional-centric production and sales eras to the marketing-driven, management/consumer-centric era. Marketing becomes the philosophy and strategy by which companies'' resource allocation policies focus on improving the entire customer experience from need recognition, to product discovery, to post-purchase behavior. It is this era that introduces the frameworks that help managers see the firm as a working customer theory that help marketing managers solve problems driven by the need for customer creation and customer retention. For example, Jerome McCarthy''s marketing mix (1960) and Raymond Vernon''s product lifecycle (1966) remain cornerstones in marketing strategy formulation. The product lifecycle (PLC) has become the global standard of measuring sales revenue of new products over time tracing the product''s introduction, growth, maturity and eventual decline. Among the measures given little attention is the product''s contribution to profitability often included in lifecycle models. This paper builds upon the classic PLC framework traditionally aimed at helping marketing managers forecast sales to include helping accounting managers allocate resources within the budgetary process. Using the PLC platform, we demonstrate how incorporating the PLC Budgeting Method can improve the overall management of the resource planning and allocation process.
Keywords
product lifecycle; resource planning; allocation process; profitability