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This paper aims to propose a new country-level construct, national customer orientation, to provide a benchmark for global headquartered managers’ decisions and scholars investigating cross-national research.

A conceptual framework and unique propositions are developed that focus on how one macro-economic driver, e.g. the wealth of a country, and one macro-marketing driver, e.g. customer price sensitivity, affect national customer orientation during and after global economic downturns such as recessions and a pandemic.

An agenda setting section proposes distinct theoretical, empirical and managerial themes for future research aimed at testing the propositions at the country and organization levels over time.

Although the new construct offers substantial benefits for scholars and managers, current measures of national customer orientation are limited to data provided by the World Economic Forum or expensive primary survey-based research that restrict the number of countries, respondents and time periods.

The new national-level customer orientation construct and propositions about its drivers over time promise to provide global managers a country-level customer-based benchmark so that they can better understand, set expectations and manage customer orientation across different countries over time.

Research on market and customer orientation is consistently designated a priority by academics and practitioners. However, most previous studies exclusively focus at the micro organizational-level, with less known on how customer orientation varies at the macro country-level and over time.

This study aims to answer two unique related questions on the overarching relationship between a CEO’s personal religious affiliation, the firm’s advertising spending decision and its shareholder value. First, does the CEO’s religious affiliation, a proxy for risk taking, influence the firm’s advertising spending decision? Second, does the advertising spending decision mediate the relationship between the CEO’s religious affiliation and the firm’s shareholder value?

This study uses data on the religious affiliations of CEOs of publicly listed US firms, 1992–2014, from Marquis Who’s Who; advertising spending and shareholder value from Compustat, and panel data-based regression models including CEO characteristics from ExecuComp, and firm-, industry- and time-based controls.

We find higher advertising spending levels for Protestant over Catholic-led firms, and advertising spending mediates the relationship between a CEO’s religious affiliation and the firm’s shareholder value.

Marketing theory needs to incorporate the missing but fundamental effect of the CEO’s religious affiliation-based values on decisions and outcomes.

Boards of Directors may need to align the CEO’s and their firm’s spending goals.

While previous studies focused on the influence of religious affiliation on consumers’ attitudes and behavior, and executives’ financial and R&D spending decisions, this study, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, is the first to investigate the effect of a CEO’s religious affiliation on the firm’s advertising spending decision and its shareholder value.

This paper aims to address two unique and important questions. First, how do recessions directly affect firms’ marketing spending decisions? Second, and more importantly, do firms which are more committed to marketing spending through past recessions achieve better stock market returns?

This study is based on a combination of National Bureau of Economic Research, COMPUSTAT and Center for Research in Security Prices data on 6,000 firms between 1982 and 2009 which are analyzed using panel data-based regression models.

The authors find that firms cut marketing spending during recessions. However, firms committed to marketing spending during past recessions achieve better stock market returns. The findings are found to be robust across B2B and B2C industries, different periods and US firms which vary on the proportion of their global revenue from non-US sales.

Top executives cut marketing budgets during recessions; however, if they can resist the pressures, and strategically continue to make marketing investments during recessions, they will achieve higher stock market returns.

This is the first paper to establish the longer-term (not short-term) positive stock market performance of continuous (not episodic) marketing spending through past recessions, i.e. the view that marketing spending is necessary (not discretionary) for stock returns.

This paper aims to focus on the unique goal of understanding how marketing spending, a proxy for firm visibility, moderates the effects of corporate social responsibility (CSR) strengths and concerns on stock returns in the short and long terms. In contrast to the resource-based view (RBV) of the firm, the visibility theory, based on stakeholder awareness and expectations, offers asymmetric predictions on the moderation effects of marketing spending.

The predictions are tested based on data from KLD, Compustat and Center for Research in Security Prices from 2001-2010 and panel data based regression models.

Two results support the predictions of the visibility theory over those of the RBV. First, strengths are associated with higher stock returns, for low marketing spending firms, and only in the long term. Second, concerns are associated with lower stock returns, for high marketing spending firms, also only in the long term. A profiling analysis indicates that high marketing spending firms have high R&D spending and are more likely to operate in business-to-customer than business-to-business industries.

The two findings highlight the importance of coordination among chief marketing, sustainability and finance officers investing in CSR and marketing for stock returns, contingent on the firm’s marketing and R&D spending and industry characteristics.

This paper identifies conditions under which CSR is and is not related to stock returns, by uniquely considering three variables omitted in most past studies: marketing spending, CSR strengths and concerns and short- and long-term stock returns, all in the same study.

This paper aims to demonstrate how consumer clickstream data from a leading hotel search engine can be used to validate two hidden information processing stages – first eliminate alternatives, then choose – proposed by the revered information processing theory of consumer choice.

This study models the two hidden information processing stages as hidden states in a hidden Markov model, estimated on consumer search behavior, product attributes and diversity of alternatives in the consideration set.

First, the stage of information processing can be statistically characterized in terms of consumer search covariates, including trip characteristics, use of search tools and the diversity of the consideration set, operationalized in terms of: number of brands, dispersion of price and dispersion of quality. Second, users are more sensitive to price and quality in the first rather than the second stage, which is closer to purchase.

The results suggest practical implications for how search engine managers can target consumers with appropriate marketing-mix actions, based on which information processing stage consumers might be in.

Most previous studies on validating the information processing theory of consumer choice have used laboratory experiments, subjects and information display boards comprising hypothetical product alternatives and attributes. Only a few studies use observational data. In contrast, this study uniquely uses point-of-purchase clickstream data on actual visitors at a leading hotel search engine and tests the theory based on real products, attributes and diversity of the consideration set.

This paper aims to develop a conceptual framework, in an effort toward building a contingent theory of drivers and consequences of managerial metric use in marketing mix decisions, this paper develops a conceptual framework to test whether the relationship between metric use and marketing mix performance is moderated by firm and managerial characteristics.

Based on reviews of the marketing, finance, management and accounting literatures, and homophily, firm resource- and decision-maker-based theories and 22 managerial interviews, a conceptual model is proposed. It is tested via generalized least squares – seemingly unrelated regression estimation of 1,287 managerial decisions.

Results suggest that the impact of metric use on marketing mix performance is lower in firms which are more market oriented, larger and with worse recent business performance and for marketing and higher-level managers, while organizational involvement has a lesser nuanced effect.

While much is written on the importance of metric use to improve performance, this work is a first step toward understanding which settings are more difficult than others to accomplish this.

Results allow identification of several conditional managerial strategies to improve marketing mix performance based on metric use.

This paper contributes to the metric literature, as prior research has generally focused on the development of metrics or the linking of marketing efforts with performance metrics, but paid little attention to understanding the relationship between managerial metric use and performance of the marketing mix decision and has not considered how the relationship is moderated by firm and managerial characteristics.