A Multidimensional Approach to Marketing Performance Evaluation
Companies usually like to claim that they are market-oriented; however, many studies reveal that businesses typically rely on short-term financial indicators, only a small percentage of firms consider time spent on consumers as important, and marketing is considered as a cost rather than an investment. Companies, however, need to understand their own and their environment's operations in order to set the right objectives, manage their tangible and intangible resources, and achieve the best possible performance. This paper focuses on performance measurement and its relation to market orientation, marketing activity, objectives and marketing resources. This research reveals that though marketing's role in the organisation seems to be significant managers' commitment to marketing often remains at an attitudinal level, and they tend to overestimate their marketing efforts. Furthermore, customer-based measures seem to be good indicators of market-orientation, still managers consider financial and market performance measures to be more important. This paper supports the finding that market orientation and business success are strongly related to one another.