Designing a Model for the Relationship Between Marketing Activities and Organization Performance: Meta-Analysis on the Moderating Role of Research Topic Characteristics

Abstract

The role of marketing in explaining firms’ business performance has received significant attention throughout the history of the marketing discipline. Over the past two decades, researchers have considerably enhanced the conceptual understanding of the role of marketing in enabling firms to create and sustain a competitive advantage. Recent advances in the marketing–performance interface have also begun to provide more empirical evidence of the impact of specific marketing activities and different types of marketing-related assets on firms’ performance. On the other side, results of studies in many academic fields that are conducted about a specific issue are usually confusing and contrasting. Meta-analysis is a research approach that helps the researcher to a large extent to identify the moderating variables in the results of previous studies. Despite various researches having been conducted, such contrast is also observed in the relationship between marketing activities and organization performance. Characteristics of the research topic can be referred to among the several reasons that have been mentioned for such divergence in similar studies. It was tried in the present survey to identify the role of moderating variables regarding the characteristics of the research topic in the relationship between marketing activities and organization performance using the meta-analysis approach. The results revealed that the moderating variables related to the characteristics of the research topic consisting of marketing activity indexes, organization performance indexes, researcher field and year of publication of the research have been led to a significant difference in the results of studies regarding the effect of marketing activities on performance of organizations.   Keywords: Marketing activities, Organization performance, Characteristics of research topic, Meta-analysis approach.