Assessing marketing performance: history and challenges

While assessing the marketing performance of an organisation is increasingly important, it is also increasingly difficult due to the nature of the discipline and several challenges facing researchers and managers. This article reviews the long history of marketing performance assessment and the nature of those challenges. The earliest work in this area examined the productivity of marketing, traditionally defined as financial output per marketing input. Later writers have explored non-financial outputs, and looked at an expanded concept of marketing activities and assets as they lead to business outcomes. I briefly review four measures that have attracted substantial attention in the past ten years - market orientation, customer satisfaction, customer loyalty and brand equity - and conclude with a discussion of challenges for the better measurement and understanding of performance in marketing.