I'm looking for benchmarks (or even a rule of thumb) for market
research spending... for example, as a percentage of expected
revenues, or as a percentage of the total new product development
budget or marketing budget.  I'm specifically interested in the
publishing/information/software industry in a business-to-business
environment.  Budgeting/projecting cost on a market research project
level is NOT what I'm after.

Hi,

Throughout the course of this research I discovered there were a
variety of ways to think about Market Research Budgets.

As a starting point, I found market research budgets to be generally
considered as a part of the marketing budget. While it's not quite on
industry, the outline for the travel industry said there were 4
different ways to develop a marketing budget.

Approaches to Developing Marketing Budgets 
-Historical or arbitrary budgeting 
-Rule-of-thumb budgeting (i.e., as a % of sales or something) 
-Competitive budgeting 
-Objective-and-task budgeting (recommended approach)
http://www.hospitality-tourism.delmar.com/resources/morrison/slides/htmch09thirded.ppt

Of course marketing budget differ according to industry. Here's a
report that says "marketing budgets (on average). The rule of thumb is
4 to 10 percent of gross revenues for an effective marketing budget.
The amount ranges from 1 percent for industrial B2B firms to 10
percent or more for consumer packaged goods, which can be higher when
introducing new products."
http://www.pandia.com/features/marketing.html

The next question would be, how much of the marketing budget to
allocate for research. Again, there's no specific answer. A market
research report released by the Pennsylvania State Univeristy office
of Market Research showed that in 2000, the average market research
budget was 4% of the marketing budget.
http://www.outreach.psu.edu/omr/reports/adtrends.pdf

Specifically to your inquiry regarding the B2B industry, here's a UK
company that advises spending 10% of the ad budget on research.
http://www.b2binternational.com/article7.html

Forester Research provided these statistics on B2B marketing budget
projections for the year 2000-2005. They range from a ratio of 1-7
spending on research vs all marketing in 2000 to a 1-5 ratio in 2005.
http://www.forworkresearch.com/KF_b2bMarkForc.html

Here's three aditional examinations of how to consider a market
research budget withing the context of a marketing budget.
Market Research - The Process
http://www.onlinewbc.gov/docs/market/mk_research_proc.html

Allocating Advertising Dollars for Advertising Research
http://www.busreslab.com/tips/tip10.htm

American Express Small Business on Marketing Budgeting
http://home3.americanexpress.com/sg/Smallbusiness/articles/sml_biz_articles_mark
eting.asp


If you get to the library, you may want to look up the following
source I found on the Columbia University web site.
HF 5802 .A26. (Reference) Advertising Ratios & Budgets. (Schonfeld &
Associates. Annual). Tracks advertising expenditures for publicly
traded companies. Also reports current and historical ad budgets, the
ratio of ad spending to net sales, the ratio of ad spending to gross
margin, and the annual average compound growth in ad spending for each
company. Information is arranged by SIC, allowing comparison of
company performance to industry norms. Company data within industry
are reported in ranked order and alphabetically.
 

search strategy:
marketing budgets
allocating marketing budgets, B2B
market research budgets AND marketing budgets