ABSTRACT
Important parts of the marketing world were under heavy pressure to reform even as this symposium met. One of the most important pressures for such reform has been generated within the firm but outside of marketing. There is widespread demand from the top managements and from other parts of organizations for the development and implementation of marketing performance metrics that allow marketing managers to quantify their contribution to firm performance. (Another major pressure for marketing reform is technologically driven; it is the somewhat delayed but nonetheless rapid growth of interactive marketing [Barwise and Farley 2004b]. While this is beyond the scope of the present discussion, it will have the important side effect of generating orders of magnitudes of additional and potentially useful data about buyers and potential buyers.)
We discuss structuring ongoing analysis of marketing data (metrics) in a form resembling a series of designed meta-analyses based on a form of best practices analysis.
