Neil A. Morgan

BENCHMARKING MARKETING CAPABILITIES FOR SUSTAINABLE COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE

Market-based organizational learning has been identified as an important source of sustainable competitive advantage. One particular learning mechanism, benchmarking, is a widely used management tool that has been recognized as appropriate for identifying and enhancing valuable marketing capabilities. However, despite widespread admonitions to managers, the benchmarking of marketing capabilities as a route to sustainable competitive advantage has received scant empirical attention. The authors empirically examine the potential business performance benefits available from benchmarking the marketing capabilities of top-performing firms. The results suggest that benchmarking has the potential to become a key learning mechanism for identifying, building, and enhancing marketing capabilities to deliver sustainable competitive advantage.

Firm-level export performance assessment: Review, evaluation, and development

Export performance is one of the most widely researched but least understood and most contentious areas of international marketing. To some extent, this problem can be ascribed to difficulties in conceptualizing, operationalizing, and measuring the export performance construct, often leading to inconsistent and conflicting results. This study reviews and evaluates more than 100 articles of pertinent empirical studies to assess and critique export performance measurements. Based on gaps identified in this evluation, guidelines for export performance measure development are advanced, suggesting, however, a contingency approach in their application. Several conclusions and implications for export strategy and future research are derived from this analysis.

ANTECEDENTS OF EXPORT VENTURE PERFORMANCE: A THEORETICAL MODEL AND EMPIRICAL ASSESSMENT

Both the size and the rapid growth of global exporting have focused the attention of marketing researchers on the factors associated with firms’ export performance. However, knowledge of this increasingly important domain of marketing activity remains limited. To address this knowledge gap, the authors draw on the strategy and marketing literature to develop an integrative theory of the antecedents of export venture performance. The interplay among available resources and capabilities, competitive strategy decisions, and competitive intensity determines export venture positional advantages and performance outcomes in the theoretical model. The authors empirically assess predicted relationships using survey data from 287 export ventures. Results broadly support the theoretical model, indicating that resources and capabilities affect export venture competitive strategy choices and the positional advantages achieved in the export market, which in turn affect export venture performance outcomes. In contrast to structure–conduct–performance theory predictions, the data indicate that the competitive intensity of the export marketplace does not have a direct effect on export venture positional advantages or performance. However, competitive intensity moderates the relationship between export venture competitive strategy choices and the positional advantages realized.

A Configuration Theory Assessment of Marketing Organization Fit with Business Strategy and Its Relationship with Marketing Performance

Theory posits that organizing marketing activities in ways that fit the implementation requirements of a businesss strategy enhances performance. However, conceptual and methodological problems make it difficult to empirically assess this proposition in the holistic way that it is theoretically framed. Drawing on configuration theory approaches in management, the authors address these problems by assessing marketing organization fit with business strategy as the degree to which a businesss marketing organization differs from that of an empirically derived ideal profile that achieves superior performance by arranging marketing activities in a way that enables the implementation of a given strategy type. The authors suggest that marketing organization fit with strategic type is associated with marketing effectiveness in prospector, defender, and analyzer strategic types and with marketing efficiency in prospector and defender strategic types. The study demonstrates the utility of profile deviation approaches for strategic marketing theory development and testing.

Internal marketing—The missing half of the marketing programme

Abstract This article examines the use of internal marketing in implementing strategy. The concepts of ‘internal marketing’ and the ‘internal customer’ may be applied operationally in two ways. The internal marketing programme may be seen as a direct parallel to the conventional external marketing programme, using the same concepts and elements, and the same process of customer and segment targetting. Also, the internal marketing concept provides a language for analysing organizational issues such as the impact of organizational power, political behaviour and corporate culture. The article offers a set of practical tools for tackling implementation problems. The practical application of the internal marketing is illustrated in two company case examples. Also empirical evidence is presented, which suggests that little attention is currently given to such issues by U.K. executives, providing a number of opportunities for management education and development, consultancy, and research.

Understanding Firms' Customer Satisfaction Information Usage

Despite theoretical and empirical research linking a firms business performance to the satisfaction of its customers, knowledge of how firms collect and use customer satisfaction information is limited. The authors investigate firms’ customer satisfaction information usage (CSIU) by drawing on in-depth interviews, a focus group of managers, and the existing literature. They identify key characteristics of the major processes involved in firms’ CSIU and compare the CSIU practices revealed in their fieldwork with widely held normative theory prescriptions. They also identify variations in CSIU among the firms in the fieldwork and uncover factors that may help explain the observed differences.

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.

Consumer-Based Brand Equity and Firm Risk

Investors and managers evaluate potential investments in terms of risk and return. Research has focused on linking marketing activities and resource deployments with returns but has largely neglected marketings role in determining risk. Yet the theoretical literature asserts that investments in market-based assets, such as brands, should lead to reductions in firm risk. Adopting risk measures that are well established in the finance literature, the authors use credit ratings to capture debt-holder risk and the standard deviation of stock returns to measure equity-holder risk, which they then decompose into systematic and unsystematic equity risk. The authors examine the impact of consumer-based brand equity (CBBE) on firm risk using data covering 252 firms from EquiTrend, COMPUSTAT, and the Center for Research in Security Prices over the 2000–2006 period. They find that a firms CBBE is associated with firm risk and explains variance in the risk measures beyond that explained by existing finance models (i.e., it has “risk relevance”). They also find that CBBE has a stronger role in predicting firm-specific unsystematic risk than systematic risk but that it also has a particularly strong role in protecting equity holders from downside systematic risk. The results have clear economic significance and suggest that managers should make brand management part of the firms risk management strategy and protect or even increase CBBE investments during periods of economic uncertainty.

Interactions between marketing and quality at the SBU level: Influences and outcomes

The management of quality and development of effective cross-functional cooperation have assumed a new strategic importance over the past decade. However, many companies have reported that quality strategies have failed to deliver anticipated performance benefits and that ineffective interfunctional relationships may be to blame. This study explores marketing-quality interfunctional relationships as a potential source of quality strategy implementation failure at the strategic business unit (SBU) level. This study focuses on interdepartmental connectedness, communication and conflict between marketing and quality, and the antecedents and consequences of these dimensions of interfunctional interaction. Using data from a pooled response mail survey, the results suggest that marketing-quality interactions are associated with senior management quality leadership, strategic quality planning process, and control system characteristics. Interfunctional interactions between marketing and quality are found to be only weakly related to relative quality, market performance, and financial performance outcomes.

Assessing Performance Outcomes in Marketing

Research in marketing has increasingly focused on building knowledge about how firms’ marketing contributes to performance outcomes. A key precursor to accurately diagnosing the value firms’ marketing creates is conceptualizing and operationalizing appropriate ways to assess performance outcomes. Yet, to date, there has been little conceptual development and no systematic examination of how researchers in marketing should conceptualize and measure the performance outcomes associated with firms’ marketing. The authors develop a theory-based performance evaluation framework and examine the assessment of such performance outcomes in 998 empirical studies published in the top 15 marketing journals from 1981 through 2014. The results reveal a large number of different performance outcome measures used in prior empirical research that may be only weakly related to one another, making it difficult to synthesize findings across studies. In addition, the authors identify significant problems in how performance outcomes in marketing are commonly conceptualized and operationalized. They also reveal several theoretically and managerially important performance areas in which empirical knowledge of marketings impact is limited or absent. Finally, they examine the implications of the results, provide actionable guidelines for researchers, and suggest a road map for systematically improving research practice in the future.