LAUSR

Abstract Previous advertising efficiency studies have neglected the “black box” of the consumer purchase funnel. Thus, this study decomposes advertising efficiency into marketing and sales efficiency to unravel a complicated and multi-stage consumer purchase decision, and measures divisional advertising efficiency in the US consumer car purchase funnel using a slack-based measure network data envelopment analysis. Additionally, this study identifies consumer key brand perception attributes that affect divisional advertising efficiency by using a bootstrapped truncated regression to offer strategic advertising initiatives that are appropriate to car brand position and characteristics at each step of the customer buying funnel. The contributions of this study are twofold. First, this study is an unprecedented attempt at researching the divisional advertising efficiency for opening the hidden “black box” of the consumer car purchase journey. Second, this study suggests that advertising strategies, such as advertising themes and appeal type, should be differentiated in accordance with consumer key brand perception attributes at each step of the customer buying funnel, depending on car brand types such as luxury and mainstream.