Degree Name
Master of Science
Department or Program
Agribusiness Economics
Advisor
Ira Altman
Abstract
The purpose of this study is to exam the effect of marketing on the agribusiness economic sales functions in the agricultural manufacturing industry using financial metrics. For the purpose of this study the agricultural manufacturing industry will be broken into four separate sectors. These sectors are: agricultural machinery manufacturing, processing and agronomy-based manufacturers, automotive/automotive part manufacturers, and other agricultural manufacturers.
The resource-based view is used to target sectors competitive advantage in this research. Applied business knowledge will support the application of the research. The financial metrics used in this study were extracted from Bloomberg Terminal in the College of Business at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. The Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) rated data compiled consist of numerical values representing expenditure, return on investments, and product segmentation in terms of individual allocation, segment value, and segment count. Ordinary Least Square Method will be used to analyze the data while incorporating dummy variables to differentiate between sector types.
From this research it can be deduced that marketing has a large impact on the salesforces functions explained by the operating return on assets and return on investment capital. The predicted outcome for operating return on assets and return on investment capital are rhetorical suggesting operating return on assets and return on investment capital are good indicators of the impact of marketing on the agribusiness economics sales functions. In contrast, it is believed that sales are a vague indictor of performance and cannot be used as a performance metric.