Breaking Down Organizational Silos: Marketing Resource Allocations and Firm Performance

Marketing value assessment, the identification and measurement of marketing’s influence on firm performance, is a challenging, yet imperative undertaking as marketing managers are under increasing pressure to defend the value of their activities (Hanssens and Pauwels 2016; Morgan 2012). These activities necessitate financial resource allocations that trickle down from larger strategic marketing investment decisions (Hanssens and Pauwels 2016). However, these allocation efforts are often managed separately in functional “silos” within firms (Hanssens and Pauwels 2016; Keiningham, Aksoy, Perkins-Munn and Vavra 2005), potentially leading to ineffectiveness and inefficiencies of marketing resource allocations. Surprisingly, very little is known about the quantifiable issues associated with managing specific marketing assets and resource allocations within organizational silos and the implications for marketing managers (Keiningham et al. 2005).In this dissertation, I examine the effects of resource allocations, and specifically, the importance of cross-functional and strategic integration, on marketing performance indicators. In my first essay, I investigate marketing resource allocations through two fundamental processes, value creation and value appropriation, across two strategic dimensions, internally versus via interfirm relationships. In my second essay, I investigate potential spillover benefits from marketing resource allocations to customer satisfaction and brand equity. Using a theoretical resource orchestration and a marketing capabilities framework, I promote the importance of breaking down organizational silos at different hierarchical levels to enhance marketing resource allocation effectiveness and efficiencies.