My work intends to measure the 'Marketing Performance" of organisations in my study area, However, the financial measures may not be readily available for the same.
Several studies use a scale of 20 or more measures across 3 dimensions, one of which is the financial dimension (Market share, Sales etc). I am interested to know if the financial measures taken up in such studies (or other studies that measure marketing performance using self reporting ) need to be verified with the financial statements of the organizations or are the self-reported marketing performance too considered adequate for research purposes.?
There is no correct answer here...you have to pick an approach you are comfortable with and mitigate the limitations of it:
For example: On the negative side, self-reported scales can be troublesome if you are comparing performance to another variable that is also self-reported as your research is then subject to common methods bias where the dependent and independent variable are both provided by the same respondent.
In addition, self-reported scales are generally subjective in nature and therefore are likely to produce a different result in terms of who is a "high performer" then company reported measures which tend to be objective measures.
(see Rich, 1999).
On the positive side, there are some marketing/sales studies that indicate that self-reported performance scales do not necessarily provide statistically different results from management evaluations of performance assuming they are measuring the same construct. . In addition, while company objective measures appear on the service to be "high quality" - they are often simplistic in nature (one dimensional) and do not adequately measure all aspects of performance the way that a self-reported scale can. In addition, they are often captured at such a high -level that the measure is not actually controllable by the person/team being evaluated. For example - using revenue growth as a measure of performance of your marketing team, would be problematic because there are many aspects of it are not under the marketing team's control: 1) selling success, 2) current economy, etc. Thus a single measure is generally NOT appropriate - multiple measures/dimensions are superior. To borrow an analogy - how would you feel if your intelligence was measured based on 1 dimension?
.
Scales or methods can be varied based on your expectation and aim of the study. Also general literature can guide you to select the best way. However, I think selfreported data should be supported bu other scales
- Badges
- Science topic
- Similar topics
- Correction