Measuring Marketing Productivity: Current Knowledge and Future Directions

TLDR

Marketers have long lacked accountability for linking expenditures to shareholder value, eroding credibility and threatening the marketing function’s distinct role within firms. The article proposes a broad framework that catalogs current knowledge and identifies research areas to improve the validity, reliability, and practicality of marketing productivity assessment. The authors propose a framework that catalogs existing knowledge and outlines future research directions for assessing marketing productivity. They conclude that marketing expenditures can be linked to shareholder value and that disseminating new assessment methods will enhance marketing vitality and firm performance.

Abstract

For too long, marketers have not been held accountable for showing how marketing expenditures add to shareholder value. As time has gone by, this lack of accountability has undermined marketers’ credibility, threatened the standing of the marketing function within the firm, and even threatened marketing's existence as a distinct capability within the firm. This article proposes a broad framework for assessing marketing productivity, cataloging what is already known, and suggesting areas for further research. The authors conclude that it is possible to show how marketing expenditures add to shareholder value. The effective dissemination of new methods of assessing marketing productivity to the business community will be a major step toward raising marketing's vitality in the firm and, more important, toward raising the performance of the firm itself. The authors also suggest many areas in which further research is essential to making methods of evaluating marketing productivity increasingly valid, reliable, and practical.