Marketing Performance and Competitive Advantage
Summary
Marketing performance encompasses a firm’s ability to generate and sustain desirable market outcomes through strategic marketing activities. Competitive advantage arises when a firm’s marketing efforts yield superior value propositions, customer engagement and profitability relative to rivals. Central to this interplay are capabilities such as market sensing, customer-linking and selling effectiveness, which firms integrate with strategic positioning and resource endowments. The advent of digital technologies, shifting consumer behaviours and heightened environmental volatility have transformed traditional performance drivers, prompting scholars to revisit classic relationships—such as that between market share and profitability—and to examine the role of both digital and adaptive marketing competencies. Insights from this body of research inform managerial decisions on resource allocation, capability development and resilience building, with global significance for firms seeking to navigate rapid technological change and competitive intensity.
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Marketing Performance and Competitive Advantage publication trend
The graph below shows the total number of articles in marketing performance and competitive advantage across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).
Technical terms
Digital marketing capabilities: The firm’s ability to deploy digital tools and platforms to create, communicate and deliver customer value.
Market share–profitability relationship: The traditional positive association between a firm’s proportion of industry sales and its profit margins, subject to contextual moderators.
Selling capability: A dynamic, efficiency-oriented set of resources and processes through which a firm executes sales activities to generate value.
Competitive advantage: The condition in which a firm achieves superior performance relative to competitors by leveraging unique resources, capabilities and strategic positioning.
References
- Does bigger still mean better? How digital transformation affects the market share–profitability relationship. International Journal of Research in Marketing (2024).
- The value relevance of digital marketing capabilities to firm performance. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science (2022).
- How Does Selling Capability Impact Firm Value? The Moderating Roles of Relative Strategic Emphasis, Market Volatility, and Technological Volatility. British Journal of Management (2022).
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