Managerial Attention to Marketing and Abnormal Stock Market Returns: Evidence from Quarterly Earnings Call
By Sudhir Voleti, Praveen Kopalle
Journal of Marketing
Citation
Voleti, Sudhir., Kopalle, Praveen. (2025). Managerial Attention to Marketing and Abnormal Stock Market Returns: Evidence from Quarterly Earnings Call Journal of Marketing .
Copyright
Journal of Marketing, 2025
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Abstract
Marketing’s contribution to firm value is an important question in business. Drawing upon the attention-based view in managerial cognition literature, we apply a marketing lens to managerial attention among top management teams in large US public corporations and consider a 'managerial attention to marketing' construct to estimate the marketing function’s value-relevance in financial markets. We measure managerial attention to marketing as the share of marketing related content in the total information content disclosed by top management teams to financial market participants in quarterly earnings conference calls. We employ an event study approach followed by a calendar-time abnormal returns model with time-varying risk factors to investigate, validate, and empirically establish the (i) financial value-relevance, (ii) explanatory power and (iii) predictive power of managerial attention to marketing on cumulative abnormal stock returns over a quarterly horizon for a large sample of firms (S&P1500) over a 15 year time-frame.

We distinguish managerial attention to marketing (MAM) from other firm-level constructs such as market orientation (Kohli and Jaworski 1990; Narver and Slater 1990) by removing the incidence of all five market orientation dimensions (customer, competitor, interfunctional, profitability, and longterm) from MAM and find that MAM sans market orientation continues to bear significant explanatory and predictive power over current and future abnormal returns.

Sudhir Voleti is an Associate Professor of Marketing at the Indian School of Business (ISB), where he is also a distinguished faculty member in Business Analytics. A renowned researcher in the fields of marketing research and business analytics, he has previously served as Associate Dean of Faculty Alignment and the Registrar's Office (FARO) at ISB.

Professor Voleti holds a PhD in Marketing and an MS in Applied Statistics from the University of Rochester, a PGDM from Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Calcutta, and a BE from the Birla Institute of Technology, Ranchi, along with years of industry experience.

Professor Voleti is recognised as one of India's leading data science academicians. His research focuses on combining data with econometric and statistical methods to explain phenomena of marketing interest such as evolution in the equity of brands across time, valuation of brands using secondary sales data, the sales impact of geographic and abstract distances between products and markets, and the performance, productivity, and benchmarking of salesforce organisations.

Professor Voleti has published numerous research articles in leading academic journals such as Management Science, Journal of Marketing, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, the International Journal of Research in Marketing, and the Journal of Retailing, as well as book chapters and articles in the popular media. He also serves on the editorial review boards of numerous journals. Some of his significant works include "Impact of Reference Prices on Product Positioning and Profits", "The role of big data and predictive analytics in retailing", "Why the Dynamics of Competition Matter for Category Profitability", "A Bayesian non-parametric model of residual brand equity in hierarchical branding structures", and "An Approach to Improve the Predictive power of Choice - Based Conjoint Analysis".

Sudhir Voleti
Sudhir Voleti