When Does Market Share Matter? New Empirical Generalizations from a Meta-Analysis of the Market Share–Performance Relationship

Abstract

The impact of market share on financial firm performance is one of the most widely studied relationships in marketing strategy research. However, since the meta-analysis by Szymanski, Bharadwaj, and Varadarajan (1993) , substantial environmental (e.g., digitization) and methodological (e.g., accounting for endogeneity) developments have occurred. The current work presents an updated and extended meta-analysis based on all available 863 elasticities drawn from 89 studies and provides the following new empirical generalizations: (1) The average raw market share–financial performance elasticity is .132, which is substantially lower than the effectiveness of other intermediate marketing metrics. This result challenges a widely used strategy that solely focuses on increasing market share. (2) Elasticities differ significantly between contextual settings. For example, they are lower for business-to-business firms than for business-to-consumer firms, for service firms than for manufacturing firms, and for U.S. markets than for emerging and Western European markets. The authors also observe differences between countries with respect to a general time trend (e.g., lower elasticities in recent times for Western European markets) and recessionary periods (e.g., lower elasticities in the United States, higher elasticities in non-Western economies).