ÂÜÀòÉç¹ÙÍø

Special Issue of Journal of Marketing Research on Marketing Accountability

The Journal of Marketing Research (JMR) has announced earlier a special issue on “Marketing Accountability.” The deadline for submitting articles for the special is 01 May 2015.

Relevant Topics for the Special Issue

Marketing investments represent an important component of corporate expenditures and off balance sheet, intangible market-based assets comprise an increasing share of a company’s market value. Effective marketing calls for justification of marketing investment decisions ex ante, and evaluation of investment outcomes ex post. Marketing Accountability as a research theme highlights the importance of evaluating and improving marketing investment and expense decisions.

In recent years, there has been a renewed emphasis in demonstrating that marketing investments can translate into profitable growth. The challenges in marketing measurement today are not limited to improving marketing mix models, to assessing returns to marketing, or to examining the right metrics, but creating the right combination of analytics, research, and business case-based findings to guide both effective strategy and implementation. At the same time, the rise of new channels, such as the Internet and mobile communication, and the increasing importance of word-of-mouth and sponsorship, make marketing resource allocation decisions much more complex. CMO’s and marketing executives are increasingly under incredible pressure to make every dollar count. Now more than ever, it is imperative to demonstrate the ROI of marketing activity.

Ex post evaluation of marketing decisions and programs is just as important as the methods of making such decisions. Research on this area would likely shed light on valuation of important intangibles such as brand and customer equity, advertising expenditure, sales force effectiveness etc. and has the potential to enhance the quality/informativeness of financial statements.

Here are some potential topics for the special issue:

• Do firms sacrifice long-run value creation by cutting back on marketing investments in order to meet earnings targets?
• Is there a tradeoff in the impact of marketing investments on short-term performance metrics (e.g., margins, earnings) versus creation of future value (e.g., growth, valuation ratios such as price-earnings multiples)?
• What is the impact of quality of earnings (e.g., recurring cash flow from repeat customers) on firm valuation?
• How does uncertainty of payoff on marketing activities impact budgeting and resource allocation decisions?
• Does disclosure of marketing expenses and efforts impose a disciplinary role and improve investment efficiency?
• Does higher transparency (disclosure) always enhance trust and investor confidence?

Submission and Review Process

Although the “Marketing Strategy Meets Wall Street” conference, held in January 2015 at Singapore Management University, is affiliated with the special issues, paper that were not presented at the conference are also welcome for the special issue. Thus, presenting a paper at the conference is not a necessary condition for submission for the special issue.

The special issue will follow the regular JMR review process. Manuscripts should be submitted at Manuscript Central () and the special issue option should be selected.

One of the four JMR co-editors (Bucklin, Grewal, Meyer, and Ratner) would serve as the editor for each manuscript as is the case with regular JMR submission. The associate editors would be primarily drawn from the conference editing panel (i.e., Professors Rajendra Srivastava, David Reibstein, Dominique Hanssens, and Shuba Srinivasan) but regular JMR associate editors will also be used where appropriate.

Important Dates

The deadline for submitting the manuscripts for the special issue is 01 May 2015 – however, authors are encouraged to submit papers as early as these are ready. The special issue is likely to be published in late 2015 or early 2016.

If there are any questions, please contact Raj Grewal (grewalr@unc.edu).

 

---