The role of paid media, earned media, and sales promotions in driving marcom sales performance in consumer services

• The use of Frontier analysis to understand sales performance helps organizations better understand where to invest limited marketing communication resources. • Paid and earned media positively influence firm sales performance. • An excessive percent of store traffic driven by sales promotion activities negatively affects firm sales performance. • Benchmarking similar firms based on sales performance of exemplar firms can provide a roadmap for weaker performers to reallocate marketing communications investments. Firms deploy an array of marketing communications (marcom) tools to influence sales performance, yet critics lament that such efforts can be incredibly inefficient. This research focuses on the impact of a range of marcom inputs on sales performance. It uses a multi-media data set assembled from four industry sources to examine the joint impact of paid media, earned media, and sales promotion activity. It does so through two Frontier methodologies (Stochastic Frontier (SFA) and Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA)) to benchmark sales performance. All firms within a single industry are compared to these sales performance benchmarks to generate a sales performance gap metric that pinpoints the most effective marcom activities. The results show that paid and earned media positively influence sales performance, however, excessive sales promotion activity has a negative effect. Several scenario analyses provide actionable strategic insights for managers to more efficiently allocate marketing communications efforts.