News reports carrying positive or negative sentiment about a firm influence its stock market performance. This study examines how two firm-controllable marketing factors, advertising and marketing capability, moderate the relationship between news stories and firm stock returns. Analysis of a panel data set of more than 7,000 firm-month observations indicates asymmetric and complementary moderating roles of the two marketing variables: advertising reinforces the favorable impact of positive news on abnormal stock returns, and marketing capability mitigates the adverse impact of negative news. Moreover, these moderating effects operate through different stakeholders. Whereas the moderating effect of marketing capability is due to its influence on customers and thus affects the level and volatility of future cash flows, advertising moderates the effect of news through individual investors’ attention and response to the news. The econometric analysis accounts for potential endogeneity between news reports, stock returns, and marketing variables, and the results are robust to alternative measures and analysis approaches. The findings suggest the need for managers to broaden their stakeholder focus when evaluating advertising's returns and to communicate the value of marketing capability to investors.

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T his study examines the dynamics of online buzz over time before product release. Employing functional data analysis, we treat the curve of prerelease buzz evolution trajectory as the unit of analysis and find that the shape of the curve significantly adds power in predicting new product performance compared with using product characteristics and firm advertising alone. Moreover, daily prerelease buzz evolution data enable accurate sales forecasting long before product release, which allows sufficient time for managers to adjust product design and/or marketing strategy. For example, the forecasting accuracy using an early buzz evolution curve ending on the 61st day before product release is not only higher than that using accumulated buzz volume until then but also higher than that using the total volume of all buzz up until product release. Beyond the sales outcome, we find that prerelease buzz is quickly reflected in firm stock returns before product release and reduces the absolute amount of postrelease stock price correction. The model accounts for endogeneity, and the results are robust after controlling for buzz sentiment. We also explore the factors influencing prerelease buzz evolution patterns, thus generating insights into how to manage prerelease buzz dynamics to enhance new product performance.

The strategic importance of business-to-business (B2B) relationships is well recognized, but their financial impact remains equivocal. This study links social capital from three types of B2B networks of young technology firms with their initial public offering (IPO) value. The authors identify three relevant types of absorptive capacity that facilitate the transformation of B2B social capital into IPO value. For the transformation to occur, the authors find that young firms need not only the opportunity to access the resources provided by B2B relationships but also the ability to leverage them through the complementary capability-namely, absorptive capacity. They test the hypotheses on a sample of 177 IPOs, and the results are robust to endogeneity concerns and alternative measures. As one of the first studies in marketing-finance interface to focus on young firms, the findings provide novel insights, such as the deleterious financial consequence of having marketing and research-and-development B2B relationships without the relevant absorptive capacity. The authors conclude with a discussion of managerial implications regarding communicating the value of absorptive capacity, disclosure of marketing-related information, and the importance of marketing for young technology firms.

A firm's strategic emphasis on value creation versus appropriation, which is typically reflected in its resource allocation between R&D and advertising, is a central corporate decision that significantly influences financial performance. However, the drivers of such decisions remain underexplored. This study identifies a significant predictor of strategic emphasis, namely, corporate managerial hubris, and reveals some of its boundary conditions. Leveraging a unique dataset based on text mining of press releases issued by over 400 firms across 13 years, the authors demonstrate that high corporate managerial hubris predicts low strategic emphasis on advertising relative to R&D. However, this effect is mitigated significantly by firm maturity, corporate governance, and industry-level strategic emphasis. The results provide novel insights into the effects of hubris on firm spending, the situations wherein marketing decisions tend to be subject to managers' psychological bias, the means of preventing over-or under-investment in marketing strategy, and the recruitment and training of managers.