For too long, marketers have not been held accountable for showing how marketing expenditures add to shareholder value. As time has gone by, this lack of accountability has undermined marketers’ credibility, threatened the standing of the marketing function within the firm, and even threatened marketing’s existence as a distinct capability within the firm. This article proposes a broad framework for assessing marketing productivity, cataloging what is already known, and suggesting areas for further research. The authors conclude that it is possible to show how marketing expenditures add to shareholder value. The effective dissemination of new methods of assessing marketing productivity to the business community will be a major step toward raising marketing’s vitality in the firm and, more important, toward raising the performance of the firm itself. The authors also suggest many areas in which further research is essential to making methods of evaluating marketing productivity increasingly valid, reliable, and practical.

The terms relationship marketing (RM) and loyalty have been extensively promoted in marketing literature. Advocates of RM and loyalty have argued that RM leads to loyalty and loyalty leads to profitability. However, currently available evidence questions these arguments. We propose a term relationship intention. Relationship intention is willingness of a customer to develop a relationship with a firm while buying a product or service attributed to a firm, brand, and a channel. We build a multi-item scale for measuring relationship intention. We propose a framework, wherein we argue that the relationship intention is influenced by the customers’ perceived firm equity, perceived brand equity, and perceived channel equity. We propose the consequences of relationship intention as being low cost to serve, price premium, word-of-mouth promotion, and company advertisement. We also argue that relationship intention moderates the association between lifetime duration and profitability. Finally, we discuss the managerial implications of relationship intention in terms of transaction and RM

This study attempts to lend empirical evidence to the relevance of the arbitrate pricing theory in providing economic interpretation to stock market factors. A multistage model to explain the stock returns of a representative set of U.S. companies is developed. Monthly returns data for individual securities are obtained and the cross-sectional interdependencies between securities are identified. The returns of the securities are found to be related to at least three, and possibly four, factors. The hypotheses related these factors to broad economic aggregates such as cost and be supply of money, in addition to the market return index. The presence of idiosyncratic industry effect in the market is also demonstrated. The replication of the analysis with another sample from a different time period yields similar results. Marketing implications are drawn based on the findings of this study.