Designing a Model for the Relationship Between Marketing Activities and Organization Performance: Meta-Analysis on the Moderating Role of Research Topic Characteristics

Bagher Asgarnezhad Nouri,Saeed Fathi,Milad Soltani,Ali Kazemi,Ali Sanayei

doi:10.32890/ijms.23.2.2016.10468

Abstract

The role of marketing in explaining firms’ business performance has received significant attention throughout the history of the marketing discipline. Over the past two decades, researchers have considerably enhanced the conceptual understanding of the role of marketing in enabling firms to create and sustain a competitive advantage. Recent advances in the marketing–performance interface have also begun to provide more empirical evidence of the impact of specific marketing activities and different types of marketing-related assets on firms’ performance. On the other side, results of studies in many academic fields that are conducted about a specific issue are usually confusing and contrasting. Meta-analysis is a research approach that helps the researcher to a large extent to identify the moderating variables in the results of previous studies. Despite various researches having been conducted, such contrast is also observed in the relationship between marketing activities and organization performance. Characteristics of the research topic can be referred to among the several reasons that have been mentioned for such divergence in similar studies. It was tried in the present survey to identify the role of moderating variables regarding the characteristics of the research topic in the relationship between marketing activities and organization performance using the meta-analysis approach. The results revealed that the moderating variables related to the characteristics of the research topic consisting of marketing activity indexes, organization performance indexes, researcher field and year of publication of the research have been led to a significant difference in the results of studies regarding the effect of marketing activities on performance of organizations. Keywords: Marketing activities, Organization performance, Characteristics of research topic, Meta-analysis approach.

Highlights

Nowadays in the business environment, to establish sustainable competitive advantage, firms need to make use of intangible assets such as knowledge, network and innovation capability more than before
The coefficient of the independent variable of the publication year was equal to 3.65 which showed that there is a significant positive relationship between the mean of the values of the effect size and the publication year of the research. It means that the effect of the marketing activities on organization performance has become stronger in the course of time
It was tried in this survey to identify the causes of such a difference in the results of the researches regarding marketing activities-organization performance using the meta-analysis approach

Summary

Introduction

Nowadays in the business environment, to establish sustainable competitive advantage, firms need to make use of intangible assets such as knowledge, network and innovation capability more than before. The marketing department had a subtle role in regulating the general strategies of firms One reason for this problem was the inability of marketing managers in determining and measuring the values they took with themselves to the firms. A growing number of studies have emphasized the role of marketing capabilities in achieving and sustaining competitive advantage (Song, Nason & Di Benedetto, 2008; Vorhies & Morgan, 2005). In this respect, marketing capabilities can be seen as a joint process of bringing intangible (i.e. knowledgebased) and tangible resources together to create valuable outcomes. Through the development and leveraging of firm resources the firm establishes a set of capabilities (e.g. marketing capabilities) that allow the firm to accomplish a higher level of firm performance (Griffith, Yalcinkaya & Calantone, 2010)

Methods

Results

Conclusion