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Prof. Jan-Benedict Steenkamp (The University of North Carolina)
- Date: Thursday, February 12th, 2026
- Time: 4:00 pm-5:30 pm
- Location: Kaulbachstr. 45, Room 006
- Title: Evolution of Marketing Mix Effectiveness: A Global Investigation for Price, Assortment, and Distribution
- Abstract: This study investigates how the effectiveness of three core marketing-mix instruments—price, assortment, and distribution—evolves over time across brands, categories, and countries using the Empirics-First approach to relevant knowledge generation (Golder et al. 2023). The authors analyze household panel data covering over 16,000 brands in 85 consumer packaged goods categories for on average 10 years across 34 countries in Asia, Europe, North America and South America. They adopt a rolling-window estimation approach to derive time-varying elasticities, followed by meta-analytic modeling to identify systematic drivers of change. Averaged across time, brand price elasticity is -.640, assortment elasticity is .311, and distribution elasticity is .213. However, time-invariant averages have limited meaning given that 98.5% of brands exhibit significant evolution in at least one instrument’s elasticity. Substantial heterogeneity in trends emerges, moderated by brand, category, and country factors. The single most important predictor for all three instruments is the brand’s baseline elasticity. The stronger the elasticity, the larger its downward trend. Brand power and whether the brand is a local brand emerge as other key factors. Consumer purchase frequency and share-of-wallet are stronger category predictors of elasticity trajectories than retailer factors such as e-commerce penetration, hard-discount share and private label share. Findings challenge static allocation rules and underscore the need for dynamic, elasticity-based resource allocation in brand management.
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