Taking Stock of the State of Marketing Practice

Marketing is under increased pressure to demonstrate its economic value to the firm. The challenge is exacerbated by the fact that marketing uses attitudinal (e.g. brand awareness), behavioral (e.g. brand loyalty) and financial (e.g. sales revenue) performance metrics, which, unfortunately, do not correlate highly with each other. Thus marketing initiatives could be viewed as successful by one metric, and a waste of resources by another metric. The resulting ambiguity has several consequences for marketing practice. Among these, the scope and objectives of marketing differ widely across organizations. There is confusion around the difference between marketing effectiveness and efficiency. Hard and soft metrics, and offline and online metrics are typically not integrated. The two dominant tools for marketing impact assessment, i.e. response models and experiments, are rarely combined. Risk in marketing planning and execution receives little consideration and, finally, analytic insights are not communicated effectively to drive decisions. We first examine how these factors impact both research and practice. We then examine how the use of marketing analytics can improve marketing decision making at different levels of the organization. We identify gaps in our knowledge base that set the stage for future research and enhanced practice in demonstrating marketing’s value.