The Relative Importance of Advertising and Publicity for Marketing and Firm Performance

This study brings together five sets of industry data to develop a better understanding of the relative effects of specific marketing communications on a chain of "marketing productivity measures," metrics that evaluate the influence of marketing at consumer, market, financial, and firm levels. The results reveal that publicity and advertising do have unique and different relative effects on the chain of marketing productivity. On average, publicity has a stronger relative importance compared with advertising for several indicators, although the effects for any individual firm may vary. These findings have implications for the current marketing communications environment that is increasingly saturated with publicity from a variety of sources