Marketing Metrics for the Beverage Industry: Evaluating Current Metrics, Identifying Desired Measures, and Proposing a Performance Framework

Abstract

Measuring marketing performance is a critical yet challenging task in the beverage industry, where promotional intensity, and shifting consumer preferences strongly influence market success. While metrics are widely used to evaluate outcomes, many organizations struggle with fragmented systems, limited consumer insights, and a lack of integrated frameworks that link marketing activities to business results. This thesis addresses these issues by exploring how marketing performance is currently measured in the beverage industry, which additional metrics practitioners would like to implement, the barriers that hinder adoption, and how a structured framework can be designed to close these gaps. Guided by four research questions, the study draws on eleven in-depth interviews with industry professionals from organizations of different sizes and business models, complemented by insights from academic literature. The findings show that existing measurement systems are dominated by financial and sales-based KPIs such as ROI, market share, and distribution, complemented by brand equity indicators such as brand power, awareness, and differentiation. Advertising and media metrics are tracked across classical and digital channels, although offline indicators are often seen as unreliable compared to increasingly prominent digital metrics. Customer-level insights, such as satisfaction, loyalty, and journey activation, are applied more unevenly, and their potential remains underdeveloped across many firms. While the mentioned metrics dominate reporting, practitioners expressed a strong desire for more forward-looking and consumer-centric measures, such as customer journey tracking, deeper trend insights, and standardized ROI calculations. At the same time, technical fragmentation, high costs, and organizational inertia emerged as significant barriers to implementation. In response, the thesis proposes a tiered measurement framework based on the principles of Marketing Mix Modeling. It integrates quantitative and qualitative KPIs, clarifies data ownership, and adapts to firm size by offering low-cost, pragmatic tools for smaller firms and advanced econometric solutions for larger corporations. By moving beyond descriptive reporting toward integrated, explanatory, and predictive systems, the framework helps position marketing not merely as a cost center but as a driver of strategic growth. This research contributes to both academic and managerial debates by bridging the gap between existing practices and future aspirations, offering a blueprint for more holistic and actionable marketing measurement in the beverage industry.

Date of Award	2025
Original language	English
Supervisor	Christoph Eisl (Supervisor)