Gökhan Yildirim

Consumer Attitude Metrics for Guiding Marketing Mix Decisions

Marketing managers often use consumer attitude metrics such as awareness, consideration, and preference as performance indicators because they represent their brands health and are readily connected to marketing activity. However, this does not mean that financially focused executives know how such metrics translate into sales performance, which would allow them to make beneficial marketing mix decisions. We propose four criteria---potential, responsiveness, stickiness, and sales conversion---that determine the connection between marketing actions, attitudinal metrics, and sales outcomes. We test our approach with a rich data set of four-weekly marketing actions, attitude metrics, and sales for several consumer brands in four categories over a seven-year period. The results quantify how marketing actions affect sales performance through their differential impact on attitudinal metrics, as captured by our proposed criteria. We find that marketing--attitude and attitude--sales relationships are predominantly stable over time but differ substantially across brands and product categories. We also establish that combining marketing and attitudinal metrics criteria improves the prediction of brand sales performance, often substantially so. Based on these insights, we provide specific recommendations on improving the marketing mix for different brands, and we validate them in a holdout sample. For managers and researchers alike, our criteria offer a verifiable explanation for differences in marketing elasticities and an actionable connection between marketing and financial performance metrics.

App Popularity: Where in the World Are Consumers Most Sensitive to Price and User Ratings?

Many companies compete globally in a world in which user ratings and price are important drivers of performance but whose importance may differ by country. This study builds on the cultural, economic, and structural differences across countries to examine how app popularity reacts to price and ratings, controlling for product characteristics. Estimated across 60 countries, a dynamic panel model with product-specific effects reveals that price sensitivity is higher in countries with higher masculinity and uncertainty avoidance. Ratings valence sensitivity is higher in countries with higher individualism and uncertainty avoidance, while ratings volume sensitivity is higher in countries with higher power distance and uncertainty avoidance and those that are richer and have more income equality. For managers, the authors visualize country groups and calculate how much price should decrease to compensate for a negative review or lack of reviews. For researchers, they highlight the moderators of the volume and valence effects of online ratings, which are becoming ubiquitous in this connected world.

Can Retail Sales Volatility be Curbed Through Marketing Actions

For many years, marketing managers have used dynamic sales response models to compute expected sales conditional on the available information. These models fail to recognize that the volatility conditional variance of sales can vary over time. Moreover, the covolatilities conditional covariances between sales and marketing-mix variables can be time varying. Both concepts introduce a new range of strategic and tactical considerations for product and brand managers. Using a multivariate volatility model, we investigate the covolatility of sales and the marketing mix of a focal brand and competing brands in the market. We also examine carryover effects from a volatility perspective. The methodology is applied to six product categories sold by Dominicks Finer Foods. The results reveal valuable implications for marketing managers. Data and the online appendix are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mksc.2016.1013 .