Profit Impact of Marketing Strategies (PIMS) was initiated in 1960 by General Electric, developed further by the Marketing Science Institute, and later administered by the Strategic Planning Institute. It is a data bank that provides a source of cross‐sectional and time‐series data. The database contains information on a number of environment, strategy, performance, competition, and firm‐related variables for approximately 4,000 businesses (or strategic business units ) collected from over 500 participating large and small companies, operating in a wide range of industries. It covers markets in North America, Europe, and elsewhere. The approximate 200 items of data are collected in a standardized format from each business and cover: the environment in which the business is operating, such as the number and size of customers, rates of market growth, the distribution channels it uses ( see channels of distribution ); the business's competitive position in the market, quality, prices, and costs relative to the competition; and annual measures of the business's financial and operating performance. The most publicized use of the PIMS data is in a regression model ( see regression and correlation ), which contains 37 independent variables grouped into seven categories: attractiveness of the business environment; the strength of competitive position; the differentiation of competitive ..