4 findings
Strategic › Growth Paths
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.
Strategic › Product & Brand Management
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.
Strategic › Product & Brand Management
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.
Strategic › Value Leveraging
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.
Cross the framework