Marketing’s Financial Impact: How Executives, Pricing and Customers Shape Firm Value
(A2026-133885)

AUTHORS

Paul Seehawer, Goethe University Frankfurt; Andr� Tomano, Maastricht University; Stepan Gogolev, Maastricht University; Alexander Edeling, KU Leuven

ABSTRACT

This special session brings together four complementary perspectives on the Marketing-Finance Interface to advance our understanding on how marketing creates financial impact. The first paper by Paul Hilfrich and Simone Wies “How Executive Traits Drive Innovation” examines how CMO personality traits influence firm-level innovation. Using Big Five personality assessments derived from earnings call transcripts and social media data, the authors analyze 682 CMOs and 707 CEOs across 489 firms. Initial results indicate that CMO extraversion and openness are positively associated with innovation outcomes. Additionally, CEOs tend to hire CMOs whose personalities align with their own, highlighting the role of executive complementarity in shaping strategic outcomes. Second, the project “Talk the Walk: Predicting Pricing Power with Top Management Team’s Language” by André Tomano, Thomas Post, Niels Holtrop, Joost Pennings and Hauke Wetzel investigates pricing power's impact on firm value. The authors develop a novel text-based measure that captures managerial signaling of a firm’s pricing power via dependency parsing on a corpus of 92,266 earnings call transcripts from 7,999 firms. The third study, “Strategic Price Decreases in Inflationary Times – an Event Study”, by Stepan Gogolev, Bram Foubert and Anne ter Braak investigates retailer’s strategic price decreases and their impact on shareholder value. The authors examine the differential effects of three types of strategic price decreases on shareholder value and the moderating impact of inflation. An event study of 112 announcements from U.S. food retailers shows that while strategic price decreases generally lead to positive abnormal returns, the effects vary by both type of price decrease and inflation level. Concluding the session, the paper “Impact of Customer Satisfaction and Customer Dissatisfaction on Firm Performance during Business Cycle Fluctuations” by Britt Vancoetsem, Yves van Vaerenbergh, Bart Larivière, Alexander Edeling and Forrest Morgeson III investigates how customer (dis-) satisfaction affects firm profitability during business cycle fluctuations. Using a panel of over 15,000 quarterly observations from 414 U.S. firms, the authors find that while customer satisfaction shows no significant differential effect across business cycles, customer dissatisfaction has a significantly more negative impact on profitability during economic downturns. Collectively, these papers demonstrate that firm value is shaped by interconnected factors: executive traits, TMT communication, pricing actions, and customer responses. By examining these linkages across varying macroeconomic conditions, the session underscores that context matters profoundly for understanding when and how marketing decisions create or destroy shareholder value.