The Interface of Marketing and Finance: Understanding the Value of Key Signals and Metrics
(A2025-125953)

AUTHORS

Alexander Edeling, KU Leuven; Simone Wies, Goethe University Frankfurt; Paul Hilfrich, Goethe University Frankfurt; Lars Gemmer, University of Cologne; CHRISTIAN SCHULZE, Frankfurt School of Finance & Management

ABSTRACT

The marketing-finance interface has developed into a cornerstone within marketing-strategy research, focusing on metrics, methods and findings that link the fields of marketing, finance, and accounting in an interdisciplinary way (Edeling, Srinivasan, & Hanssens, 2021). This special session explores novel signals and metrics within this domain that hold both theoretical significance and practical relevance but remain underexplored in prior research. Leading the session is “Turning Market Signals into Innovation” by Simone Wies and Dorian Alexander Petrich. Firms use stock market signals from new product preannouncements (NPPAs) to refine their innovation strategies, with negative investor reactions often leading to delays in introducing the new product, presumably for taking time to improve the product. This study finds that firms responsive to such feedback outperform non-responsive firms in the long run, highlighting the strategic value of leveraging investor intelligence in the innovation process. “The Price is Right: Stock Market Reactions to Price Information in Earnings Calls” by Alexander Edeling, Paul Hilfrich, Alexander Himme and Shuba Srinivasan examines how investors react to the price-related signals that companies provide in their quarterly earnings calls. Applying large language models to earnings call transcripts, they find that firms provide information about product prices in the vast majority of earnings calls, that abnormal stock returns are larger for negative than for positive price information, and that investor reactions depend on several signal-, signaler- and signal-environment related moderators. “From Wall Street to Main Street: The Influence of Investors on Consumers” by Lars Gemmer and Philip Pollmann-Fervers adds a novel feedback perspective to marketing-finance research. Specifically, the study accounts for the recent development that stock market news, short-selling reports and investment discussions on social media have become an integral part of consumers’ media landscape. It answers the question whether investor-behavior-related signals influence brand perceptions and consumer purchasing decisions. To conclude the session with a more operational topic, Christian Schulze and Maximilian Kaiser offer a comprehensive analysis of what is probably the most critical key figure in online metrics with “E-Commerce Conversion Rates”. It examines temporal trends, category-specific variations, and country-level differences in conversion rates (CR), and explores the potentially non-linear relationship between CRs and average order value (AOV) and the implications for customer acquisition costs. Using advanced machine learning models, the research explains significant variance in CRs and provides actionable insights for online retailers and marketers.