Measuring marketing productivity: A comparative study between fuzzy-set and regression analysis

Abstract

Measuring marketing productivity and linking it to the bottom-line of the firm has gained a lot of attention among marketing researchers. However, most of marketing literature consists of models examining only the direct linear effects and neglecting the combinatorial effect of inputs.

This thesis uses a novel approach called Fuzzy-Set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (FS/QCA) that overcomes the weaknesses of traditional methods by examining the marketing activities as configurations that lead to certain outcome. Additionally, the results are compared against traditional regression based models.

The thesis focuses on measuring the effectiveness of airline ticket promotions for specific routes. The case company is Finnair - the largest airline of Finland and the fifth oldest airline in the world. The case data consists of all promotions for one European point of sale carried over the full year of 2015.

The most important contribution of this thesis is to describe the relationship between the performance outcomes and the different marketing configurations - the selected marketing promotion variables. It is shown that FS/QCA methodology results in more managerially meaningful explanation of promotion performance and that the configurations can be only partially explained by the traditional regression methods. Theoretically the study contributes to the validation of the rather new methodology FS/QCA in the field of marketing.