Marketing Investments and Company Value in Developing Countries

ABSTRACT The evolution of the economic context has intensified competition in retail, creating new challenges for companies. Among these challenges are the difficulty of measuring the results of marketing activities, the inconsistency in the sources of information, and the disregard of the temporal characteristics of the returns on these investments. Considering that this context may differ depending on a country’s stage of development, the objective of this study is to analyze the impact of marketing investments on the value of companies. To this end, Tobin’s Q was used as a financial variable and the sample was divided into two groups to discriminate between developed and developing countries. The sample included 1,872 companies from 97 countries. The technique used for analysis was a hierarchical multilevel model of panel data. The results reveal that investment in marketing has a positive relationship with the financial indicator Tobin’s Q, and the impact of such investments in developing countries is greater than it is in developed countries. Thus, from the results of this work, it can be concluded that marketing investments have a beneficial potential for societies, especially those that are in economic environments considered to be in development.