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The term ‘strategy’ is one of the most frequently used terms in business, and its application in marketing is particularly common. Company strategy, market strategy, marketing strategy, sales strategy, promotion strategy, distribution strategy, low pricing strategy – it would take a long time to list all of them. Although this term is so commonly in use, its definition is not as straightforward and it can be interpreted in different ways. In comparison with tactical decisions, strategy is much more significant for an organisation as it brings long-lasting consequences. It is implemented by higher level managers on a regular basis, and it is based on external, often subjective information, so decisions – especially at the time they are made – are difficult to evaluate.

Taking into consideration the fact that strategy refers to a long-term rather than a short-term period, strategic decisions serve as the basis for undertaking operational activities. However, marketing refers to the market and the competition. It is possible to claim that marketing strategy is trying to find an answer to the question to which path an organisation should follow in order to achieve its goals and objectives. If, for example, a company has a goal to generate a profit of PLN 1 million by selling 100,000 pieces of a product, the market strategy should answer at least the following two questions:

1. Who will be our target group, for example, who will purchase the 100,000 pieces of the product?

2. Why is it us from whom a potential buyer should purchase the product?

Who will be our target group, for example, who will purchase the 100,000 pieces of the product?

Why is it us from whom a potential buyer should purchase the product?

The target market will be defined if a reply to the first question is provided. The second question identifies the foundations of competitive advantage. These two issues, that is, target market and competitive advantage are the strategic marketing issues. You cannot change your target group unexpectedly while competitive advantage is the basis for changing decisions regarding prices, promotions and sales.

This chapter describes the measures of marketing activities which refer to strategic aspects and testify a company’s market position – the measures of the performance of target groups and competitive advantage. Readers’ attention should be also focused on the indices that are less popular in Poland and, therefore, may be underestimated. It seems that some of them, for example, the index of marketing resources allocation and the marketing risk index, provide a lot of valuable information and, at the same time, make it possible to show the value of marketing investments. Their wider use in the near future is only a matter of time.

The aim of this chapter is to develop a performance measurement framework for understanding the relationships among drivers of customer profitability in internet companies.

We recognize an opportunity to improve management control systems for internet companies, where performance measurement systems currently focus on measuring web data, such as number of customers, cost of service, cost of acquisition (CoA), and churn rate. However these indicators, taken separately, do not provide useful information to make decisions.

To fill this gap we developed a framework, which we designate as the Lifetime Value Scorecard, to investigate the relationships between customer data and financial data, providing an early indication as to whether or not the marketing strategies being implemented are successful. We then offer an application of the Lifetime Value Scorecard to the mobile value-added services industry, where content and services are provided to consumer cell phones, mainly using wireless networks.

Over the past 25 years as a marketing academic, I have been fortunate to have collaborated with various researchers and firms and have contributed to the advancement of the marketing field. This is a review article that tracks my progress through these years that has led me to explore different areas of marketing, thereby shaping me as a researcher and an academic. As I see now, all of my research work can be viewed from a decision-making point of view – decisions that marketers can make either at the market, brand/firm/store, or the customer level. These decisions have in turn been transformed into strategies or tactics leading up to successful implementations and improved bottom-line results. The development of strategies/tactics and successful implementations can be seen in nearly 10 areas of research that I have involved myself in. This article also highlights how my research studies have contributed and advanced the creation of knowledge in each of these research areas.

Attitudes, perceptions, and intentions of a firm's customers, which can be captured via customer feedback metrics (CFMs), provide valuable information about the state of a firm's customer base. CFMs can help capture the impact of marketing actions on future customer behavior and future firm performance, and thus can help make marketing become more accountable. CFMs have received much attention in marketing research and business practice since the 1970s. In this chapter, we provide a short historical overview of the development of, and research about, CFMs, we classify the different types of CFMs, we highlight the empirical findings of the drivers and consequences of CFMs, and we explore how CFMs can be integrated in a firm's customer dashboard in order to make marketing more accountable. We furthermore explore some of the challenges in accurately measuring CFMs, and in the end of this chapter, we provide information on how to capture CFMs in the age of social listening via modern tools involving text-, voice-, and video-mining.

Review of Marketing Research, now in its seventh volume, is a fairly recent publication covering the important areas of marketing research with a more comprehensive state-of-the-art orientation. The chapters in this publication review the literature in a particular area, offer a critical commentary, develop an innovative framework, and discuss future developments, as well as present specific empirical studies. The first six volumes have featured some of the top researchers and scholars in our discipline who have reviewed an array of important topics. The response to the first six volumes has been truly gratifying, and we look forward to the impact of the seventh volume with great anticipation.

Allocating budget optimally to marketing channels is an increasingly difficult venture. This difficulty is compounded by an increase in the number of marketing channels, a rise in siloed data between marketing technologies, and a decrease in individually identifiable data due to legislated privacy policies. The authors explore the rich attribution modeling literature and discuss the different model types and approaches previously used by practitioners and researchers. They also investigate the changing landscape of marketing attribution, discuss the advantages and disadvantages of different data handling approaches (i.e., aggregate vs. individualistic data), and present a research agenda for future attribution research.