A Resource-Based View of Competitive Marketing Advantage

摘要

We propose that four key marketing resource allocation activities—product investment, product portfolio expansion, marketing communications investment and customer relationship expansion—create advantage by influencing customer demand and value in different ways. Causal ambiguity associated with achieving advantage is not so much in identifying which activities to invest in; rather, casual ambiguity arises regarding the appropriate level of resources and effort to allocate to each activity given the moderating effects of industry, firm, measurement, and customer characteristics. We demonstrate this ambiguity by linking advantage-creating activities to three diverse measures of firm performance in a single industry: (1) individual household utility, (2) aggregate customer response, and (3) net income. The household utility analysis incorporates six years (2009-2014) of transaction data for 145,937 households patronizing 15 firms in a single geographic market.