Modeling the marketing strategy-performance relationship : towards an hierarchical marketing performance framework

Accurate measurement of marketing performance is an important topic for both marketing academics and marketing managers. Many researchers have recognized that marketing performance measurement should go beyond financial measurement. In this paper we propose a conceptual framework that models marketing performance as a sequence of intermediate performance measures ultimately leading to financial performance. This framework, called the Hierarchical Marketing Performance (HMP) framework, starts with highly specific measures, measures that are closely related to the marketing strategy under study, and ends with general performance measures, measures that can be used to assess the effectiveness of almost any kind of marketing strategy. In an empirical study involving 640 companies, the HMP framework is validated for a database marketing strategy. The results clearly support the path structure of the HMP framework. The HMP framework is a generic model, and the authors believe that it can be applied for many different marketing strategies and at many levels of aggregation, and that it can be helpful to integrate the outcomes of comparable marketing studies that rely on different performance measures.