Marketing Strategy and Wall Street: Nailing down Marketing's Impact

Stock prices are based in large part on corporate financial statements, augmented by analysis by stock analysts. The ultimate goal of any marketing expenditure should be to increase the value of the firm, but the road from marketing expenditure to stock price is usually circuitous. This is because marketing's path to financial impact is through revenues, and the road to revenues runs through the customer. Typically, a long chain of effects is involved to account for the impact of a marketing expenditure (Rust et al. 2004), and the effects of marketing investments play out over time. This special issue focuses on exploring relationships along this chain from marketing actions to marketplace outcomes and the creation of market-based assets and firm value.