Market-based assets. Building value through marketing investments

The goal of the company is to deliver value to investors. According to the resource-based view theory, companies need to develop a differential advantage in order to maintain earnings in excess of the cost of capital. Resources which are valuable, rare, inimitable and non-substitutable make it possible for businesses to develop and maintain competitive advantages. Companies may create differential advantages by building market-based assets. Emerging trends suggest that the purpose of marketing is creating and managing market-based assets in order to derive shareholder value. In these conditions, the resources allocated to marketing strategies should be viewed as investments which create assets. This paper highlights the way marketing activities and marketing expenditures contribute to creating market-based assets and, implicitly, to creating the value at the level of the companies. (C) 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.