• Asia Marketing Journal
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• 제15권3호
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• pp.53-77
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• 2013

As advertising and promotions are categorized as operating expenses, managers tend to reduce marketing budget to improve their short term profitability. Gauging the value and accountability of marketing spending is therefore considered as a major research priority in marketing. To respond this call, recent studies have documented that financial market reacts positively to a firm's marketing activity or marketing related outcomes such as brand equity and customer satisfaction. However, prior studies focus on the relation of marketing variable and financial market variables. This study suggests a channel about how marketing activity increases firm valuation. Specifically, we propose that a firm's marketing activity increases the level of the firm's product market information and thereby the dispersion in financial analysts' earnings forecasts decreases. With less uncertainty about the firm's future prospect, the firm's managers and shareholders have less information asymmetry, which reduces the firm's cost of capital and thereby increases the valuation of the firm. To our knowledge, this is the first paper to examine how informational benefits can mediate the effect of marketing activity on firm value. To test whether marketing activity contributes to increase in firm value by mitigating information asymmetry, this study employs a longitudinal data which contains 12,824 firm-year observations with 2,337 distinct firms from 1981 to 2006. Firm value is measured by Tobin's Q and one-year-ahead buy-and-hold abnormal return (BHAR). Following prior literature, dispersion in analysts' earnings forecasts is used as a proxy for the information gap between management and shareholders. For model specification, to identify mediating effect, the three-step regression approach is adopted. All models are estimated using Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods to test the statistical significance of the mediating effect. The analysis shows that marketing intensity has a significant negative relationship with dispersion in analysts' earnings forecasts. After including the mediator variable about analyst dispersion, the effect of marketing intensity on firm value drops from 1.199 (p < .01) to 1.130 (p < .01) in Tobin's Q model and the same effect drops from .192 (p < .01) to .188 (p < .01) in BHAR model. The results suggest that analysts' forecast dispersion partially accounts for the positive effect of marketing on firm valuation. Additionally, the same analysis was conducted with an alternative dependent variable (forecast accuracy) and a marketing metric (advertising intensity). The analysis supports the robustness of the main results. In sum, the results provide empirical evidence that marketing activity can increase shareholder value by mitigating problem of information asymmetry in the capital market. The findings have important implications for managers. First, managers should be cognizant of the role of marketing activity in providing information to the financial market as well as to the consumer market. Thus, managers should take into account investors' reaction when they design marketing communication messages for reducing the cost of capital. Second, this study shows a channel on how marketing creates shareholder value and highlights the accountability of marketing. In addition to the direct impact of marketing on firm value, an indirect channel by reducing information asymmetry should be considered. Potentially, marketing managers can justify their spending from the perspective of increasing long-term shareholder value.

• Asia Marketing Journal
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• 제14권1호
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• pp.1-24
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• 2012

본 연구는 고객만족과 기업가치 성과간의 관계를 분석하는 것이 목적이다. 기업가치성과는 주가와 신용등급으로 나눌 수 있는데, 전자는 기업의 시장가치이고 후자는 자금조달비용이라 구분하여 사용되고 있다. 고객만족과 주가와의 관계는 비교적 오래전부터 연구되어 왔으나 신용등급과의 관계는 최근 들어 연구되기 시작하였다. 대표적으로 Anderson and Mansi(2009)의 연구에서는 양자가 긍정적으로 관련된 것으로 밝혀졌으나, 윤상운(2010)이 국내자료를 사용한 연구에서는 그 관계가 입증되지 못하였다. 일치하지 않는 두 연구의 결과에서 아이디어를 얻어 본 연구에서는 고객만족이 신용등급에 긍정적 영향을 미치는 것으로 보고 이를 검증하였다. 두 연구에서 사용한 모델을 참고로 하였고 특히 우리나라 실정에서는 정부지원이 중요한 변수임을 감안하여 이를 포함한 연구모형을 설정하여 검증한 결과 긍정적 관련성이 있는 것으로 나타났다. 추가분석에서 자산규모가 큰 기업보다 작은 기업에서, 제조업보다 서비스업에서 고객만족이 신용등급에 더 유의한 긍정적 영향을 미치는 것으로 나타났다.