Name: IZAUVAM COSTA ROCHA
Publication date: 04/03/2026
Examining board:
Name |
Role |
|---|---|
| ADONAI JOSE LACRUZ | Examinador Interno |
| JULIANO DOMINGUES DA SILVA | Examinador Externo |
| MARCELO MOLL BRANDAO | Presidente |
Summary: This study investigates how business strategic orientation conditions the relationship between marketing intensity and firm performance. Although the marketing–finance interface literature recognizes that marketing investments contribute to value creation and organizational outcomes, gaps remain regarding when and for which strategic profiles these returns are more persistent over time. The study is grounded in a resource-based perspective in marketing, treating marketing capabilities as strategic resources that sustain competitive advantage and translate into better outcomes. To capture strategic heterogeneity, the study adopts the Miles and Snow typology, which classifies firms according to their pattern of competitive adaptation as prospectors, defenders, and analyzers. In this study, prospectors and defenders are treated as pure strategies because they express a relatively dominant and consistent orientation: in the first case, greater emphasis on innovation and opportunity seeking; in the second, priority on efficiency, standardization, and consolidation of already-served markets. Analyzers, in turn, are treated as a hybrid configuration because they combine stability in established domains with selective moves of renewal and entry into new opportunities according to market conditions. To test the hypotheses, the study uses secondary data from nonfinancial firms listed on the U.S. stock exchanges NYSE and NASDAQ from 1994 to 2023, extracted from the LSEG Data & Analytics® database, totaling 816 firms and 9,261 firm-year observations. The analysis is conducted using panel ordinary least squares regressions with industry and year fixed effects and robust standard errors, using Tobin’s Q as the main performance measure and ROA as an alternative. In addition, the study performs additional analyses by business cycle and competitive intensity to qualify the interpretation, given that marketing returns vary systematically with the environment. The results support H1 by showing a positive association between marketing intensity and performance, more pronounced over longer time horizons. The additional analyses further indicate that this effect holds in subsamples defined by the business cycle and by competitive intensity, remaining positive in recession and expansion as well as in environments of higher and lower rivalry, although with different magnitudes depending on environmental conditions. The results also support (H2) by showing that the effect of marketing differs across strategic orientations and changes with the competitive structure: the contrast between prospectors and defenders is more informative under different levels of rivalry, whereas the analyzer/hybrid configuration shows a distinct pattern of performance and interaction with marketing. Thus, the study contributes by demonstrating that marketing returns are not uniform and depend on business strategy, offering theoretical implications for the marketing resource-based literature and managerial implications for resource allocation, as well as contributing to market analysts in interpreting marketing returns in corporate valuations.
