Additional budget should not follow historical shares or average returns.
Additional budget should not follow historical shares or average returns. Each lever has successive tranches with declining return, sometimes dependent on creative, stock, sales force, measurement or coverage capacity. Build the incremental portfolio by ranking genuinely executable tranches, including dependencies and reserving learning capacity. Budget without absorption capacity turns a good historic return into an undeliverable promise.
Decision and method.
Fund additional tranches at the best risk-adjusted marginal return, under capacity ceilings and with required enabling investments. Split the envelope by lever, period, geography and €25k–€100k step; estimate central contribution, range, delay and reversibility. Check stock, coverage, frequency, creative, teams, data and measurement; block or reprice tranches whose capacity is unfunded. Select under ceilings, minimums, sequence and dependency constraints; compare with uniform increase. Release best-identified tranches first, measure deviation then open subsequent tranches, keeping a reserve to correct or exploit new evidence.
Worked example.
The company has €300k additional, split into six €50k tranches. Selected marginal contributions are €72k, €60k, €55k, €50k, €44k, €40k; the last includes creative production needed for video. Tranche plan: 72 + 60 + 55 + 50 + 44 + 40 = €321k expected contribution. Uniform increase of €60k over five levers gives €252k. Ranking gain: 321 − 252 = €69k. Retain plan but release in two waves: fund creative production as explicit dependency, not as returnless cost.
Checks and limits.
Every additional euro belongs to a defined executable tranche; marginal return is estimated at new spend range; capacity and dependencies are quantified before selection; a reserve and criteria for next wave exist. Historic marginal returns can change under simultaneous increase. Inter-tranche synergies are often less identified than direct effects. Wave release can miss a short commercial window.
Resources and sources.
Download the budget-growth plan. Related: rank next euros, estimate saturation, fund creative capacity. Sources: Little (1970); Doyle and Saunders (1990); Asadpour et al. (2019).