Marketplace Design

This article explores the use of marketing metrics by a sample of Vietnamese firms, providing an example of the use of marketing metrics in a "transition" economy as it grows and becomes more market and marketing driven. The analysis reports usage frequency and then develops a set of "correlation chains" linking firm characteristics, metric use, and various indicators of performance. Vietnamese managers generally report that several types of metrics are used. Ownership structure and industry also impact which metrics are utilized.

This paper proposes that customers often respond to brand extension concepts by visualizing the product. We call this process spontaneous visualization and suggest that it precedes concept evaluations. In two studies, we show that spontaneous visualization is enhanced by the fit between the parent brand and the extension category and by the ease with which the product category can be imagined. The appeal of the visualized image in turn determines whether visualization enhances or decreases concept evaluations.

American manufacturers often employ specialized agencies to create and produce advertising campaigns. This paper focuses on a critical juncture in the creation of American advertising: the meeting between the manufacturer (client) and the advertising agency, where advertising ideas are presented, discussed, and selected. Although the participants enter these meetings with the common goal of reaching agreement on the ideas that will be advanced to the next step in the creative development process, the attendees have additional, sometimes conflicting, professional and personal objectives.

This paper examines optimal advertised quality, actual quality, and price for a firm entering a market. It develops a two-period model where advertised quality influences expectations, and hence trial and the gap between actual quality and expectations determines satisfaction, which in turn impacts second-period sales. In such situations a company makes a choice between advertising high quality and getting trial, but little repeat; and advertising low quality and getting low trial, but high repeat.

We study how multi-product queueing systems should be controlled so that sojourn times (or end-to-end delays) do not exceed specified leadtimes. The network dynamically decides when to admit new arrivals and how to sequence the jobs in the system. To analyze this difficult problem, we propose an approach based on fluid-model analysis that translates the leadtime specifications into deterministic constraints on the queue length vector.

Since 1980, Michael Porter's classic Competitive Strategy has provided the methodology that most big companies use for strategic analysis. But now, distinguished Columbia Business School professor Bruce Greenwald offers a bold new theory of competition - a theory that is far simpler than Porter's and much easier for strategic planners to apply in the real world. Porter identified a complex five-force model for studying competition in any market.

The aim of strategy is to master a market environment by understanding and anticipating the actions of other economic agents, especially competitors. A firm that has some sort of competitive advantage--privileged access to customers, for instance--will have relatively few competitors to contend with, because potential competitors without an advantage, if they have their wits about them, will stay away. Thus, competitive advantages are actually barriers to entry and vice versa. In markets that are exposed, by contrast, competition is intense.

Recommendations often play a positive role in the decision process by reducing the difficulty associated with choosing between options. However, in certain circumstances recommendations play a less positive and more undesirable role from the perspectives of both the recommending agent or agency and the person receiving the recommendation. Across a series of four studies, we explore consumer response when recommendations by experts and intelligent agents contradict the consumer's initial impressions of choice options.

Organizations worldwide use contact centers as an important channel of communication and transaction with their customers. This paper describes a contact center with two channels, one for real-time telephone service, and another for a postponed call-back service offered with a guarantee on the maximum delay until a reply is received. Customers are sensitive to both real-time and call-back delay and their behavior is captured through a probabilistic choice model. The dynamics of the system are modeled as an M/M/N multiclass system.