Bruce H. Clark

Marketing Performance Measures: History and Interrelationships

This article reviews the history of measuring the performance of marketing in the firm, organised around three themes: the movement from financial to non-financial output measures, the expansion from measuring only marketing outputs to measuring marketing inputs as well, and the evolution from unidimensional to multidimensional measures of performance. Evaluation of this history suggests a need for the marketing community to develop a set of measures small enough to be manageable but large enough to be comprehensive. The paper examines the interrelationships among four important measures and suggests research issues and approaches to aid in this task.

Marketing productivity, marketing audits, and systems for marketing performance assessment: integrating multiple perspectives

Abstract Responding to competitive pressures and financial realities long familiar to other functional managers and academics, corporate shareholders, senior managers, and the Marketing Science Institute have identified marketing metrics and marketing performance measures as top research priorities. However, marketing academics have only recently begun to re-focus on this important research domain. Historically, marketing productivity analysis and the marketing audit concept have dominated approaches to assessing marketing performance. We suggest that both approaches have been fundamentally limited in terms of conceptualization and implementation, but that within each approach are the seeds of a more useful, holistic approach to marketing performance assessment (MPA). Two distinct MPA system approaches are necessary to integrate past efforts, extend our existing knowledge base, and aid management practice — normative and contextual MPA systems. We review past approaches and integrate these with more recent theoretical advances to develop conceptual models of both types of MPA systems and consider their implications for management practice and academic research.

Dashboards as a service: why, what, how, and what research is needed?

Recent years have seen the introduction of a “marketing dashboard” that brings the firm’s key marketing metrics into a single display. Service firms across industries have created such dashboards e...Recent years have seen the introduction of a “marketing dashboard” that brings the firm’s key marketing metrics into a single display. Service firms across industries have created such dashboards either by themselves or together with a dashboard service provider. This article examines the reasons for this development and explains what dashboards are, how to develop them, what drives their adoption, and which academic research is needed to fully exploit their potential. Overcoming the challenges faced in dashboard development and operation provides many opportunities for marketing to exercise a stronger influence on top management decisions. The article outlines five stages of dashboard development and discusses the relationships among demand for dashboards, supply of dashboards, and the implementation process in driving adoption and use of dashboard systems. Key topics for future research include metrics selection, relationships among metrics, and the ultimate question of whether dashboards provide sufficient benefits to justify their adoption.

Managerial perceptions of marketing performance: efficiency, adaptability, effectiveness and satisfaction

While marketing as a field has researched how marketing behaviours can affect objective measures of performance, we know relatively little about how managers make performance judgements. This paper reports the results of a study on how managers evaluate the performance of marketing in terms of efficiency, adaptability to the environment and effectiveness (results versus expectations). A survey of 130 senior marketing managers reveals that managerial perceptions of marketing performance appear multidimensional both in terms of the number of measures used and the methods of evaluating those measures, with important implications for research and practice. Of all the perspectives, effectiveness is the most important concern of managers. It has not only a strong direct effect on perceived performance, but mediates the effects of a number of other variables.

Marketing performance measurement: evolution of research and practice

This article reviews the evolution of marketing performance measurement from both research and practitioner perspectives. We find four historical research stages that have evolved in sequence but now continue concurrently, and explore how firms evolve their use of marketing performance measures. Practitioners increasingly regard effectiveness as more important than efficiency in marketing performance. The paper extrapolates that evolution to suggest future directions for practitioners. Identifying the impact of performance measurement systems over time is a critical issue for both research and improved practice.

Competitive reputations, multimarket competition and entry deterrence

This research examines how a market incumbents competitive reputation with a potential entrant can deter market entry in the context of multirnarket competition. The authors use a judgement experiment to examine this relationship. In a setting where a potential entrant is already engaged with an incumbent in another market, the study manipulates the incumbents reputation for aggressiveness and intelligence and measures the reputational effect on the entrants perceptions of the new market. The study shows that an incumbents reputation for aggressiveness but not intelligence makes a market less attractive and more risky to a potential entrant. Further, reputation has a stronger effect when the degree of multimarket contact is high.

The Evolution of Dominant Market Shares: The Role of Network Effects

This research uses simulation models to examine how dominant market shares can arise from network effects, which occur when the utility a consumer receives from a product is affected by whether others are using the same product. We demonstrate that network effects can have a substantial impact on the evolution of market share, but that the impact is sensitive to a firm’s initial position and the consumer decision-making process. We also examine the merits of investing in product quality versus investing in early acquisition of market share in markets influenced by network effects, and how arguably inferior products may dominate markets.

Assessing marketing performance: history and challenges

While assessing the marketing performance of an organisation is increasingly important, it is also increasingly difficult due to the nature of the discipline and several challenges facing researchers and managers. This article reviews the long history of marketing performance assessment and the nature of those challenges. The earliest work in this area examined the productivity of marketing, traditionally defined as financial output per marketing input. Later writers have explored non-financial outputs, and looked at an expanded concept of marketing activities and assets as they lead to business outcomes. I briefly review four measures that have attracted substantial attention in the past ten years - market orientation, customer satisfaction, customer loyalty and brand equity - and conclude with a discussion of challenges for the better measurement and understanding of performance in marketing.