Exploring Drivers of Performance in Advertising Firms in Ghana: A Perspective of Attribution Theory

Ghana’s advertising industry has witnessed tremendous growth enabled by the increasing number of local and multinational advertising agencies. The benefit of advertising to the marketing of goods and services has been acknowledged. Despite the growing importance of advertising recounted in literature, it seems there is little understanding of firm-level management issues and challenges affecting the performance of firms in the advertising industry. This paper provides a qualitative perspective of some key management issues affecting advertising sector performance in Ghana. To provide insight into these management issues, four in-depth interviews and a panel discussion of nine advertising stakeholders in the Ghanaian advertising industry were conducted to understand the factors’ driving the performance of advertising firms in Ghana. The findings show that the factors are associated with the human practices, technological advancement and managerial process of the firms. The managerial practices have instead not helped the growth of advertising firms in Ghana. The implications of this study as well as the direction of future studies have been presented at the end of the paper.