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.

Advertising and promotional expenditures in the United States grew from $47.1 billion in 1975 to $ 159.3 billion in 1985 (Bowman, 1986), a 338 percent increase over a decade. Of this increase, promotional expenditures have grown rapidly, exceeding advertising expenditures by over $30 billion in 1987. As increasing dollars are spent on advertising and promotion, advertisers are interested in knowing whether consumers' purchase decisions are influenced by these variables, and more importantly, to what extent these variables differentially affect the consumers. In other words, do different people in the market react differently to advertising and/or promotion? If so, are there groups of people who exhibit similar behavior patterns? This is an example of a market segmentation problem which is important to advertisers. This article proposes a visual approach to searching for market segments.