Marketing sometimes requires significant investments, for example for producing and airing television commercials or for sponsoring sports events. Making sound decisions on how much to spend on what requires estimates of costs and benefits these decisions would bring. Are the benefits worth the costs? This question requires expressing those benefits also in financial terms. This sounds like a management accounting topic—and it is—but it is also of great interest to marketing researchers and practitioners. What are useful methods for estimating the benefits in advance and measuring the benefits afterwards? How are companies actually doing this? What are problems, what are best practices?
The objective of this thesis is to identify and synthesize knowledge on marketing investments in research in marketing. You will conduct a systematic literature review, focusing on both empirical and conceptual studies in good marketing journals.
