1. Introduction
Organizations intending to improve their performance as a condition of survival and future
development need to analyse their main functions periodically, through operational methods
that allow the evaluation of current performance and function as management guides.
Marketing, while a major corporate function, appears to be a relevant aspect for evaluation
due to the increasingly difficult market challenges facing the majority of firms nowadays
(Kotler, 1999). As the adage says, we cannot manage what we can not measure.
Most existing measures of marketing performance focus on outputs. However, processes
are the ‘‘glue’’ that binds together everything a company does. Therefore, input measures
must also merit attention (O’Sullivan and Abela, 2007; Grewal et al., 2009). However, broad
understanding of marketing input quality under the form of processes has had a less clear
impact, largely because of the difficulty inherent to their complexity. This is the reason why
the definition of good marketing practice has been most often object of conceptual and
qualitative treatments rather than rigorous empirical studies.