Do Investors Reward Car Manufacturers: Driving Customer Satisfaction?

Marketing profession is under considerable strain to provide empirical evidence of its contribution to shareholder value creation (e.g., Hanssens et al. 2009; Srinivasan and Hanssens 2009). In this context, customer satisfaction in particular has received significant attention. Especially, an intense debate has emerged from the fact that several studies have reported conflicting results about the financial market mispricing effect associated with this market-based asset (e.g., Jacobson and Mizik 2009a, 2009b; Fornell et al. 2009; Ittner et al. 2009). The underlying mispricing hypothesis assumes that current information about this metric can predict future abnormal stock returns. However, the (non)-existence of such a mispricing effect says nothing about the value relevance of this asset—i.e., whether changes in customer satisfaction provide incremental information in explaining contemporaneous changes in stock prices (Jacobson and Mizik 2009c).