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).
The value of empirical generalizations in marketing
