Marketing

In today's turbulent business environment, customer retention presents a significant challenge for many service companies. Academics have generated a large body of research that addresses part of that challenge — with a particular focus on predicting customer churn. However, several other equally important aspects of managing retention have not received a similar level of attention, leaving many managerial problems not completely solved, and a program of academic research not completely aligned with managerial needs.

Students who want to work in business are well served by taking anthropology courses and earning anthropology degrees. Their anthropological education can be applied in a broad array of businesses: marketing, advertising, marketing research, design, new product development, organizational culture and change, sustainability, risk management, and more.

Marketing managers are responsible for understanding and predicting customer purchasing activity. This task is complicated by a lack of knowledge of all of the calendar time events that influence purchase timing. Yet, isolating calendar time variability from the natural ebb and flow of purchasing is important for accurately assessing the influence of calendar time shocks to the spending process, and for uncovering the customer-level purchasing patterns that robustly predict future spending.

Geographic price discrimination is generally considered beneficial to firm profitability. Firms can extract higher rents by varying prices across markets to match consumers' preferences. This paper empirically demonstrates, however, that a firm may instead prefer a national pricing policy that fixes prices across geographic markets, foregoing the opportunity to customize prices. Under appropriate conditions, a national pricing policy helps avoid intense local competition due to targeted prices.

On search keywords with trademarked terms, the brand owner ("focal brand") and other relevant firms compete for consumers. For the focal brand, paid clicks have a direct substitute in the organic links below the paid ad(s). The proximity of this substitute depends on whether competing firms are bidding aggressively to siphon off traffic. We study the returns to focal brands and competitors using large-scale experiments on Bing with data from thousands of brands.

The authors propose a quantitative approach for describing entertainment products, in a way that allows for improving the predictive performance of consumer choice models for these products. Their approach is based on the media psychology literature, which suggests that people’s consumption of entertainment products is influenced by the psychological themes featured in these products. They classify psychological themes on the basis of the “character strengths” taxonomy from the positive psychology literature (Peterson and Seligman 2004).

We extend latent Dirichlet allocation by introducing a topic model, hierarchically dual latent Dirichlet allocation (HDLDA), for contexts in which one type of document (e.g., search queries) are semantically related to another type of document (e.g., search results). In the context of online search engines, HDLDA identifies not only topics in short search queries and web pages, but also how the topics in search queries relate to the topics in the corresponding top search results.

We investigate the increasingly common business setting in which companies face the possibility of both observed and unobserved customer attrition (i.e., "overt" and "silent" churn) in the same pool of customers. This is the case for many online-based services where customers have the choice to stop interacting with the firm either by formally terminating the relationship (e.g., canceling their account) or by simply ignoring all communications coming from the firm.

In incentive-aligned choice experiments, each decision is realized with some probability, Prob. In three eye-tracking experiments, we study the impact of varying Prob from 0 (as in purely hypothetical choices) to 1 (as in real-life choices) on attention, information processing, and choice. Consistent with the bounded rationality literature, we find that as Prob increases from 0 to 1, consumers process the choice-relevant information more carefully and more comprehensively.