Two Essays on the Value of Marketing in the Digital Economy

Over the past three to four decades, explosive growth in data collection, storage, and processing has changed marketing practice substantially. For example, in business-to-business industries, advanced marketing analytics has supported salespeople’s decision-making by providing predictions based on new types of information. Furthermore, companies can reach consumers and ask their opinions more easily. The first essay of my dissertation quantifies the impact of the availability of such information on the marketing-sales interface. While marketing analytics intended to aid salesforce decision-making has developed rapidly, there is little empirical understanding of how the adoption of such marketing analytics may affect sales performance. Using data from a global business-to-business information technology company, we provide empirical evidence that the adoption of a new marketing analytics tool improved salespeople’s performance. By further exploring the outcomes by salespeople- and account-specific characteristics, we find that marketing analytics enabled high-performing salespeople to achieve greater sales from customers without recent transactions. In contrast, for low-performing salespeople, marketing analytics led them to winning more sales opportunities from accounts with recent transactions. Overall, marketing analytics empowers the high performers to reach a more balanced customer account portfolio and supports the low performers to seize the opportunities that might have been missed. Digitization has not only provided more information on customers but enhanced the means of communications between companies and their customers. The extant literature has explored positive behaviors that can occur after completing a survey, sometimes called the mere-measurement effect, but has neglected how the effect may depend on the valence of previous experience. In the second essay, we examine the impact of product performance on the mere-measurement effect using a unique natural experiment dataset from a securities brokerage company. Our results confirm mere-measurement effects in transaction intensity, transaction volume, and sales of other products. More importantly, the effects are greater for customers with negative pre-survey performance. The finding suggests that participation in satisfaction surveys leads to asymmetric positive effect. These results can help companies assess the return of resources invested in conducting surveys beyond the value of information and more accurately understand the relation between consumer behavior and marketing interventions.Ph.D