The nature and measurement of marketing productivity in consumer durables industries: A firm level analysis

Improving productivity is a major concern in American industry. Efforts to enhance marketing productivity have been hampered by a lack of a clear conception of what constitutes productivity in the marketing area and an associated absence of standards or benchmarks with which to compare a firm’s performance and costs. In this paper a concept of marketing productivity is presented. The PIMS data base is then used to develop situation specific benchmarks for the consumer durables industries. Reliability and validity tests of the benchmarks are presented and the managerial implications of this approach are discussed. U S WEST, Inc.