Consumer Attitude Metrics for Guiding Marketing Mix Decisions

Dominique M. Hanssens, Koen H. Pauwels, Shuba Srinivasan, Marc Vanhuele, Gokhan Yildirim
2014 Marketing science (Providence, R.I.)  
Marketing managers often use consumer attitude metrics such as awareness, consideration, and preference as performance indicators because they represent their brand's health and are readily connected to marketing activity. However, this does not mean that financially focused executives know how such metrics translate into sales performance, which would allow them to make beneficial marketing mix decisions. We propose four criteriapotential, responsiveness, stickiness and sales conversionthat
more » ... ermine the connection between marketing actions, attitudinal metrics, and sales outcomes. We test our approach with a rich dataset of four-weekly marketing actions, attitude metrics, and sales for several consumer brands in four categories over a seven-year period. The results quantify how marketing actions affect sales performance through their differential impact on attitudinal metrics, as captured by our proposed criteria. We find that marketing-attitude and attitude-sales relationships are predominantly stable over time, but differ substantially across brands and across product categories with different levels of involvement. We also establish that combining marketing and attitudinal metrics criteria improves the prediction of brand sales performance, often substantially so. Based on these insights, we provide specific recommendations on improving the marketing mix for different brands, and we validate them in a hold-out sample. For managers and researchers alike, our criteria offer a verifiable explanation for differences in marketing elasticities and an actionable connection between marketing and financial performance metrics. hierarchical linear models (HLM) and cross-effects model (CRE), empirical generalizations, dynamic programming model, optimal marketing resource allocation. 1 As noted by Haley and Case (1979) , over a large range of attitude scores, their brand share effect can display increasing returns, at least in self-stated consumer interviews (there are no observed sales or market share data in their study). However, our study considers only the leading brands in each category, so we do not have any observations at the lower end of the attitude scales. Therefore, we do not expect to observe increasing returns to * From the cross-effects model output in web appendix, read as: "Of the total variation in the awareness responsiveness model in the shampoo category, 62.48% is due to brands, 10.52% due to time, the remainder (27.00%) is residual variation.
doi:10.1287/mksc.2013.0841 fatcat:pognts4ioveddhr3lislj6r7bu