Marketing Intensity and Financial Performance of Listed Insurance Companies: An Ex Post Facto Analysis

This study examines the relationship between marketing intensity and financial performance of listed insurance companies in Nigeria over a twelve-year period (2010–2021). Anchored on the resource-based view (RBV) theory, the market orientation theory, and Tobin’s q theory, the study employs an ex post facto research design with secondary data drawn from the annual reports and accounts of seventeen (17) listed insurance firms on the Nigerian Exchange Group (NGX). Marketing intensity is operationalised through three dimensions: advertising intensity (ADI), selling and distribution intensity (SDI), and total marketing expenditure ratio (TMER). Financial performance is measured by return on assets (ROA), return on equity (ROE), Tobin’s q (TQ), and net profit margin (NPM). Panel data regression techniques, including pooled OLS, fixed effects, and random effects models, are applied, with the Hausman specification test used to select the preferred estimator. The Driscoll-Kraay standard errors and the Generalised Method of Moments (GMM) are also employed to address heteroscedasticity, cross-sectional dependence, and endogeneity concerns. The findings reveal that advertising intensity exerts a statistically significant positive effect on ROA (β = 0.142, p 0.01), ROE (β = 0.207, p 0.05), and Tobin’s q (β = 0.318, p 0.01), but an insignificant effect on NPM. Selling and distribution intensity demonstrates mixed results across performance indicators, while TMER is consistently positive and significant across all four performance proxies. The results are robust to alternative estimation strategies and survive a battery of diagnostic tests. The study concludes that marketing investment is a value-generating resource for Nigerian insurance companies and recommends that management prioritise strategic, data-driven marketing expenditure to sustain competitive advantage in an increasingly deregulated financial services environment.