Browse

The body of marketing
knowledge, mapped.

An empirical generalization is a finding that has held up across many independent studies, not a single result. Each one here is a plain-language translation of the underlying research, organized by the six value sets of the MarCaps framework. 15 are live today; more are in review.

15 findings

Knowledge › Marketing Analytics

What Marketing Research Can Actually Explain

Marketing research generates effects comparable to psychology and other social sciences, with pricing among the strongest evidence areas and methods research the weakest; the pace of new marketing knowledge has slowed as the field matures.

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Knowledge › Marketing Analytics

Marketing's Effect on Firm Value

Firm market value responds more to marketing assets, brand equity and customer relationships, than to advertising spend, with customer assets outweighing brand assets; the value of those assets rises further during recessions.

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Strategic › Growth Paths

Drivers of Organic Sales Growth

Entrepreneurial orientation, innovation, and advertising spending drive organic sales and market-share growth more than most other firm factors, and models that drop marketing distort nearly every other driver's estimated impact. Innovation's payoff is much smaller outside the US.

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Strategic › Product & Brand Management

Market Share and Profit: The Rule of Three

Mature US industries most often settle into exactly three dominant generalists, and those three-player markets earn higher operating returns and stock performance than industries with more or fewer major competitors; market share's link to profitability is U-shaped, not linear.

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Strategic › Product & Brand Management

How Distribution Drives Market Share

Distribution and market share follow a double-jeopardy pattern down to the SKU level, so a brand's low-distribution items underperform disproportionately versus its own best sellers; the same curve also flags new grocery SKUs likely to fail.

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Engagement › Content

How Online Reviews Move Sales

Average star rating drives e-commerce sales more than review volume does, especially for products that are hard to try beforehand or consumed privately; independent review sites carry more sales weight than retailer-hosted reviews, and negative ratings hurt sales more than positive ones help.

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Engagement › Content

Advertising Creativity and Consumer Response

Creative advertising, original and appropriate at once, boosts attitude toward the ad and brand and purchase intent, but doesn't reliably improve brand recall or recognition; the effect is stronger for high-involvement purchases, and judging creativity by originality alone understates its true impact.

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Engagement › Content

Owned Social Media Sales Lift

Owned social media posts move sales more than they move engagement, and the content that wins differs by goal: emotional posts drive engagement while functional, informational posts drive sales; new products see a far bigger sales lift than mature ones.

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Engagement › Content

Influencer Marketing Drivers

An influencer's social identity with followers drives attitude and engagement better than raw follower count does, while a post's entertainment and information value drives purchase intent most; sponsorship disclosure has essentially no effect on any of these outcomes.

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Exchange › Conversion

When Competitors' Ads Cancel Out Yours

Competitor advertising clutter cuts into the sales lift a brand's own TV spend delivers, driven more by how many rivals advertise than their total GRP weight; many CPG brands overspend past the optimal ad level, and price still moves sales far more than advertising.

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Exchange › Customer Attraction

TV-Driven Branded Search

TV advertising lifts branded and category search volume alike, but mostly by stealing query share from rivals rather than growing the category; the branded-keyword effect fades within hours, while the category-search lift builds slowly and lasts for days.

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Exchange › Conversion

How Much Advertising Moves Sales

Advertising's short-term sales elasticity swings widely across published models depending on modeling choices, such as whether carryover is included, functional form, and pooled versus time-series data; about half of advertising's effect carries into future periods, and European estimates run higher than US ones.

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Exchange › Conversion

Price vs. Advertising: What Moves Sales More

Sales respond far more to price than to advertising, and that gap widens for mature, nondurable products mainly because their advertising elasticity drops while price elasticity holds steady; a pricing model weighs this ratio against retail pass-through and margin to set the tradeoff.

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Exchange › Conversion

Personal Selling's Effect on Sales

Personal selling drives sales more for early life-cycle products than mature ones, and more in Europe than the US; pharmaceutical detailing shows the weakest response of any B2B sales force, and its impact has declined over time even as carryover into future periods runs strong.

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Strategic › Value Leveraging

Marketing Capabilities and Firm Performance

Marketing capability tracks firm performance more strongly than R&D or operations capability, because marketing know-how is tacit and co-created with customers, harder to copy than patented R&D or standardized operations; the edge shows mainly in market performance, share and profitability, not efficiency.

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