Practice Prize Paper—Marketing's Profit Impact: Quantifying Online and Off-line Funnel Progression

Inofec, a small- to medium-sized enterprise in the business-to-business sector, desired a more analytic approach to allocate marketing resources across communication activities and channels. We developed a conceptual framework and econometric model to empirically investigate (1) the marketing communication effects on off-line and online purchase funnel metrics and (2) the magnitude and timing of the profit impact of firm-initiated and customer-initiated contacts. We find evidence of many cross-channel effects, in particular, off-line marketing effects on online funnel metrics and online funnel metrics on off-line purchases. Moreover, marketing communication activities directly affect both early and later purchase funnel stages (website visits, online and off-line information, and quote requests). Finally, we find that online customer-initiated contacts have substantially higher profit impact than off-line firm-initiated contacts. Shifting marketing budgets toward these activities in a field experiment yielded net profit increases 14 times larger than those for the status quo allocation.