Measuring the Financial Value of Marketing Strategy with Excess Stock Market Return

This paper proposes excess stock market return as a way to measure the impact of marketing strategy on firm value. First, it provides an overview of event study method. An event study examines the excess return to a firm's stock price after the release of information that is relevant to the firm's financial success. Second, it shows how excess return captures a marketing strategy's impact on firm value. It presents a model that illustrates how a marketing strategy impacts consumers, future cash flows, firm value, investor's expectations, and excess return. Third, a comparison shows that excess return stacks up well against standard marketing metrics. Excess return yields unbiased estimates, allows direct causal inference, is future oriented, includes all cash flows, accounts for opportunity costs, factors in risk, and takes into account the time value of money.