Introduction

Recent years have witnessed a renewed emphasis on delivering superior-quality products and services to customers. As cost cutting and downsizing produce diminishing returns, the corporate spotlight has returned to marketing to encourage growth in businesses. Effective marketing can be defined as success in winning and retaining customer preference and thereby achieving the firm's long-term goals. Putting customers at the heart of every business activity is claimed to be key to sustained competitiveness (Kotler, 1997).

Marketing has to be broadly defined as being both the whole company's activities designed to satisfy customers and achieve its own objectives thereby (“pan-company marketing”) and the activities of the functional marketing department (see Webster, 1992). Marketers believe that the marketing paradigm is best for business compared to alternative orientations, such as those towards production or shareholders. But how well is that perception pursued?

Improving product and service quality and satisfying evolving customer needs and expectations requires on-going tracking and responsiveness to changing marketplace needs. Successful marketing requires monitoring of the effectiveness of marketing activities. Allocating resources to marketing, based on past effectiveness and the benchmarked experience of others, can significantly enhance performance. Better measurement leads to better marketing. What gets measured gets attention, particularly when rewards are tied to those measures (Eccles, 1991). The firm's orientation and objectives, how they measure progress towards those objectives, and the impact of measurement on performance are all likely to influence performance.

This study explores how marketing effectiveness is measured. We report how UK firms, in a variety of business sectors, assess marketing performance and whether measurement practice is related to firm characteristics (e. g., size, sector).