Marketing assets, marketing capabilities and shareholder value: An empirical analysis of asset endowments and utilization

Marketing researchers and practitioners are concerned about the accountability of marketing expenditures due to increased pressure to demonstrate the value created by marketing activities. To that end, marketing managers need to translate their marketing resource allocations and marketing performance into a recognizable performance metric, shareholder value (Rust et al. 2004). This study adopts Srivastava et al. (1998)’s classification for market-base assets and categorizes marketing assets into relational and intellectual assets. Building upon the marketing literature of marketing-finance interface (e.g. Srivastava et al. 2001; Luo and Donthu 2006) and the strategy literature of the resource-based theories (e.g. Dierickx and Cool 1989; Grant 1991), this dissertation develops a conceptual framework to address four research questions. Those research questions are: (i) what are the relationships between the assets and shareholder value? (ii) What are the relationships between the capabilities and shareholder value? (iii) What are the relationships between the assets and the capabilities? (iv) How do the assets interact with the capabilities to influence shareholder value? Combining marketing and financial analysis, this dissertation uses multiple statistical techniques including data envelopment analysis, structural equation modeling, hierarchical linear modeling, and stock return response modeling (Mizik and Jacobson 2004) to develop the complex asset and capability configurations and to test the research model. The findings show that the distinct marketing assets and capabilities have different effects on shareholder value. Although assets have positive effects on capabilities there were no interaction affects