Marketing Texto En Ingles

SHRIHARI SRIDHAR, MURALI K. MANTRALA, PRASAD A. NAIK, and
ESTHER THORSON
Few studies address the marketing budgeting problems of platform
firms operating in two-sided markets with cross-market network effects,
such that demand from one customer group in the platform influences the
demand from the other customer group. Yet such firms (e.g., newspapers
whose customers are both subscribers andadvertisers) are prevalent
in the marketplace and invest significantly in marketing. To enable such
firms to make effective marketing decisions, the authors delineate the
desired features of a platform firm’s marketing response model, specify
a new response model, and validate it using market data from a local
newspaper. The results show that the firm faces reinforcing cross-market
effects, itsdemand from both groups depends on marketing investments,
and the model exhibits good forecasting capability. The authors use the
estimated response model to determine optimal marketing investments
over a finite planning horizon and find that the firm should significantly
increase its newsroom and sales force investments. With this modelbased recommendation, the firm’s management increased itsnewsroom
budget by 18%. Further normative analysis sheds light on how crossmarket and carryover effects alter classical one-sided marketing budgeting rules.
Keywords: marketing budgeting, marketing dynamics, Kalman filter, twosided markets

Dynamic Marketing Budgeting for Platform
Firms: Theory, Evidence, and Application
A fundamental responsibility of marketing managers is
to determine theoptimal levels and allocation of scarce
marketing resources. Consequently, a large volume of work
in marketing models literature has focused on developing
normative rules for marketing resource allocation decisions
(e.g., Ingene and Parry 1995; Raman 2006), investigat-

ing the effectiveness of firms’ marketing efforts empirically (e.g., Hanssens and Ouyang 2002; Manchanda and
Honka 2005), andbuilding implementable model-based
tools for optimizing marketing investment decisions in
specific settings (e.g., Pauwels, Arts, and Wiesel 2010).
However, surveys of this literature (Hanssens, Parsons, and
Schultz 2001; Mantrala 2002; Shankar 2008) reveal that
research to date has largely ignored marketing budgeting
and allocation decisions by a substantial segment of firms
in the economy,namely, platform firms that do business in
two-sided markets (e.g., Evans 2003).
Platform firm markets are distinguished from one-sided
firm markets, in that they have two or more different groups
of customers (i.e., end users of their products or service
offerings) that the businesses aim to acquire and retain
(Rochet and Tirole 2005). Examples include print media
such as newspapers andmagazines (readers and advertisers), television broadcasting (viewers and advertisers),
shopping malls (shoppers and retailers), payment cards
(cardholders and merchants), and sports clubs (spectators
and sponsors). Specifically, platform firms’ two-sided markets are characterized by (1) the existence of two or more
distinct groups of customers interested in different offerings

*Shrihari Sridhar isAssistant Professor of Marketing, Smeal College of
Business, Pennsylvania State University (e-mail: hari.sridhar@psu.edu).
Murali K. Mantrala is Sam M. Walton Distinguished Professor of Marketing, Trulaske College of Business, University of Missouri (e-mail:
mantralam@missouri.edu). Prasad A. Naik is Professor of Marketing,
Graduate School of Management, University of California, Davis (e-mail:panaik@ucdavis.edu). Esther Thorson is Professor of Strategic Communication, Missouri School of Journalism, University of Missouri (e-mail:
thorsone@missouri.edu). The authors sincerely thank Carl Mela, Sunil
Gupta, Kenneth Wilbur, James Hess, Roland Rust, and Peter Leeflang for
their insights, which added value to this article. In addition, the authors
thank Ruth Bolton and Ross Rizley for...