Managerial Implications and Conclusions
We argued in our introduction that the CFO’s needs for financial accountability of marketing may well be met by traditional marketing-mix models on transactions data. However, the CMO also needs to understand the consumer behavior reasons why marketing does or does not impact business performance. Our paper has demonstrated that the objectives of both stakeholders can be met by recognizing the unique properties of attitudinal metrics and their relationship to sales performance. In particular, these measures have potential, stickiness and responsiveness to marketing that can be assessed from the data. Furthermore, the relevance of these metrics may be assessed by their conversion into sales performance, which provides the critical accountability link with the CFO’s needs.
By applying our approach, managers can develop actionable guidelines on how to apply closed-loop learning on the attitude metrics (e.g. “if one observes metrics with the following values/characteristics, then this marketing action will be most effective”).
Different product categories and brands within them vary significantly in the magnitude of the four proposed criteria and these differences form the basis for formulating marketing mix strategies that are more likely to succeed (see Table 13). The table provides an overview of four corner cases. The estimates reported in Table 11 allow a classification the brands into the