Marketing Intensity and Profitability: Contrasting Conclusions Based on Different Measures of Total Marketing Expenditure

摘要

1.Voluminous research documents marketing's ability to produce results.However, there is limited direct evidence relating firm marketing expenditure to profitability, or marketing efficiency.The challenge arises from poor data availability on marketing decisions in firms and questionable surrogates commonly used in place of marketing expenditure.Therefore, the primary question we address is: how does total marketing expenditure impact firm accounting performance? 2.We next compare the conclusions when actual marketing expenditure is evaluated against results based Selling, General and Administrative(SG&A)expenditure, which is a common proxy for total marketing expenditure. 3.Finally, we propose an alternate, less noisy, approximation to total marketing expenditure than SG&A and investigate the focal relationship among our sampled firms, which do not disclose their marketing costs.