Counting What Will Count: How to Empirically Select Leading Performance Indicator

Facing information overload in today's complex environments, managers look to a concise set of marketing metrics to provide direction for marketing decision making. While there have been several papers dealing with the theoretical aspects of dashboard creation, no research creates and tests a dashboard using scientific techniques. This study develops and demonstrates an empirical approach to dashboard metric selection. In a fast moving consumer goods category, this research selects leading indicators for national-brand and store-brand sales and revenue premium performance from 99 brand-specific and relative-to-competition variables including price, brand equity, usage occasions, and multiple measures of awareness, trial/usage, purchase intent, and liking/satisfaction. Plotting impact size and wear-in time reveals that different kinds of variables predict sales at distinct lead times, which implies that managerial action may be taken to turn the metrics around before performance itself declines.