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A new technique for measuring a firm's marketing emphasis
Working paper   Open access

A new technique for measuring a firm's marketing emphasis

Hoorsana Damavandi, Feng Mai and Vivek Astvansh
SSRN
05/28/2025
DOI: 10.2139/ssrn.5272785
url
https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.5272785View
Open Access

Abstract

A firm's marketing emphasis is reflected in its market orientation, marketing capabilities, and marketing excellence. We propose a new large language model (LLM)-based technique that uses a firm's managers' words in earnings calls to measure its marketing emphasis and lower-order components. We demonstrate the value of our technique by measuring marketing emphasis for 254,522 firm-quarter observations and testing the measures' internal and external validity. Additionally, we show that including our marketing-emphasis scores improves machine-learning models' predictions of advertising, R&D, trade credit, sales revenue, profit, and market value. We offer three deliverables: (1) data files containing the quarterly marketing emphasis measures for 9,916 U.S. public firms observed from 2003q1 to 2023q1, (2) Python code files, and (3) a website that measures marketing emphasis in any input text or file. These deliverables enable academics, corporate managers, and policymakers to easily assess the impact of a firm's marketing emphasis on marketing theory and practice.

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