The Marketing Firm as a Metacontingency:Revealing the Mutual Relationships between Marketing and Finance

ABSTRACT

This paper reveals the mutual relationship between a firm’s marketing behavior and its financial consequences. With panel data from publicly traded companies covering 17 years, we obtained the total expenditures in marketing of each company to represent marketing behavior and five financial outcomes, depicting the reinforcers. Each metric was composed of frequency, magnitude, and delay dimensions. The results show mutual effects between investments in marketing activities (aggregate product of interlocking behavioral contingencies of the firm) and the firm’s financial reinforcements (consequences of this product), thus corroborating the existence of metacontingencies in the marketing to finance relationship and undermatching in the finance to marketing relationship.

KEYWORDS:

• Metacontingency
• generalized matching law
• marketing investment
• financial performance
• firm

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Foundation for Research Support of the Federal District - FAPDF [Process number: 0193.001530/2017].