

Saturday, October 13 - Sunday October 14, 2007 - Chicago, IL - Hyatt Regency Chicago, 151 E. Wacker Drive

The following speakers have been invited to present their findings on important D/IM research topics on Sunday, October 14:

Academic Keynote Speaker - Opening General Session

Sunday, 10/14/07 8:15-9:30 a.m.

Why Science is Important in Database Marketing

By identifying common beliefs in database marketing and presenting evidence supporting or refuting these beliefs, Professor Blattberg will demonstrate the importance of science versus mythology in database marketing. For example: How predictable is lifetime value of a customer and what are the implications? Do enhanced relationships with customers cause greater lifetime value? Does the concept of "zero customer defections" make sense and, if not, how should it be modified?

Professor Blattberg will discuss the importance of science and engineering principles in database marketing, and how the academic world can assist practitioners in improving database marketing strategies and tactics.

Professor Blattberg will show how collaboration between practitioners and academics has and can lead to exchanges that benefit both parties. Professor Blattberg will end the presentation by outlining how the academic and practitioner worlds can better linked.

Prof. Robert Blattberg

Showcasing the most prestigious educators presenting award-winning academic research in direct marketing, this event will kick off with a keynote address by Professor Robert C. Blattberg, Director of the Center for Retail Management in the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University, where he also serves as the Chief Analytical Officer of Information Resources. Dr. Blattberg was named the DMEFs Outstanding Educator of the Year Award in 1990.

Biography:

Author of the book Database Marketing: Theory and Practice (forthcoming Winter 2008)
Author of the book, Sales Promotions: Concepts, Methods and Strategies, from Prentice Hall
Author of the book, Customer Equity, from Harvard Business Press
Editor of the book, The Marketing Information Revolution, from Harvard Business Press
Author of the Category Management Series for FMI
Director of Center for Retail Management at Northwestern University
Consultant to retailers including Kroger, Rite Aid, Winn Dixie, Best Buy, and Sears
Consultant to financial services firms including American Express, Northern Trust, and Bank One
Consultant to manufacturers including Anheuser-Busch, Hallmark, ConAgra, and Iams
Consultant to data suppliers including as Nielsen and NPD
Consultant to consulting firms including A.T. Kearney and Archstone Consulting

Robert C. Blattberg is the Polk Bros. Distinguished Professor of Retailing and Director for the Center for Retail Management in the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University. Prior to accepting this position in 1991 he served as the Charles H. Kellstadt Professor of Marketing and Director of the Center for Marketing Information Technology in the Graduate School of Business at the University of Chicago. Professor Blattberg received a B.A. degree in mathematics from Northwestern University, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Industrial Administration from Carnegie-Mellon University. While at Northwestern and Chicago, Professor Blattberg has taught marketing strategy, marketing management, retailing behavior, and statistics.

Professor Blattberg's primary research is in the areas of marketing information technology, database marketing, sales promotions and retailing. His articles have appeared in the Journal of Marketing Research, Management Science, Marketing Science, Econometrica, Journal of Marketing, Journal of Direct Marketing, and other leading academic journals. His monograph, Assessing and Capturing the Soft Benefits of Scanning, has served as a guidepost for numerous retailers. He has co-authored the book, Sales Promotions (Prentice Hall, 1990), which is widely recognized as the most authoritative publication on promotions and The Marketing Information Revolution, (Harvard Business Press, January 1994). He has completed a five-part set of guides on Category Management, published in 1995-96 by the Food Marketing Institute and translated into Spanish and Japanese. In 2001 he co-authored the book Customer Equity (Harvard Business Press, 2001) and his most recent book is Database Marketing: Theory and Practice (forthcoming Springer 2008).

In addition to his teaching, writing and research responsibilities, Professor Blattberg consults to leading retailers, consumer goods manufacturers and database marketers. His clients have included: Teradata, Anheuser Busch, Sears, PPR (a leading French retailer), Kroger (largest US grocery retailer), Rite Aid, Best Buy, A.T. Kearney, T. Rowe Price, Information Resources, American Express, Bank One and Acosta. Professor Blattberg serves as a Director of First Horizon National Corporation (Memphis), Price Chopper (Schenectady, NY) and Gapbusters (Australia).

Invited Research Session - Sunday, 10/14/07 9:45-11:45 a.m.

Venkatesh Shankar

Cross-Channel and Advertising Effects in the Hierarchy of Consumer Decision Making: An Empirical Analysis

The rapid growth in multichannel shopping is prompting managers and researchers to better understand cross-channel effects, that is, the effects of marketing efforts in one channel on purchases made through the other channels. A study by Jupiter Research predicts that by 2011, nearly half of all business transactions will be influenced by the Internet channel. In this regard, managers are interested in better understanding the effects of different channels on a consumer as she moves through the different stages (e.g., awareness, consideration, purchase intent, and purchase) in decision making. To effectively allocate resources across channels and advertising, they also need sound knowledge of the effects of different channels in conjunction with those of advertising.

Despite the importance of cross-channel effects in the presence of advertising effects, there is scant research on this issue. In this paper, we examine channel (own and cross) effects and advertising effects on the outcomes in the different stages of consumer decision making. We develop a set of proportional response models to capture the hierarchy of consumer decision making. To model own and cross channel effects, we develop a simultaneous system of consumer response models. We estimate these models using time series and cross-sectional data from the auto insurance industry, which comprises the exclusive agent channel, the independent agent channel, the Web and the call center.

Our results offer interesting insights. They show that cross-channel effects are significant. The exclusive agent channel and the Web are often synergistic. The exclusive agent and call center channels are complementary, while the independent agent and exclusive agent channels are competitive. Advertising has significant current effects on insurance quotes, qualified quotes and policies and significant lagged effects on brand awareness, insurance quotes, qualified quotes, and policies. Overall, advertising elasticity for insurance quotes is higher than the different channel elasticities, but this finding is reversed for insurance quotes within each channel. The findings offer important implications for marketers in planning their advertising and channel efforts.

Biography:
Venkatesh (Venky) Shankar is Professor of Marketing and Coleman Chair in Marketing and Marketing PhD Program Director at the Mays School of Business, Texas A&M University. He has a Ph.D. in marketing from Northwestern University. His research has been published in the Journal of Marketing Research, Marketing Science, Management Science, Strategic Management Journal, and Journal of Marketing. He is a winner of the Clarke Award for Outstanding Direct Marketing Educator, the IBM Faculty Partnership Award, the Green Award for the Best Article in Journal of Marketing Research, and the Lehmann Award for the Best Dissertation-based Article in an AMA journal. He is the co-editor of Journal of Interactive Marketing, associate editor of Management Science and is on the editorial board of Marketing Science. He serves as the President of the Marketing Strategy SIG, AMA.

Jacquelyn Thomas

Allocating Resources to Maximize Customer Profitability

This research presents a resource allocation framework that is used to balance resources between customer acquisition efforts and customer retention efforts. The key question that the framework can be used to address is, What is the profit maximizing balance? In this research we address this question in terms of 1) how much marketing spending to allocate to customer acquisition and retention and 2) how to distribute that allocation across communication channels. Elaborating on the conceptual framework, this research applies a statistical model that links acquisition, retention, and long-term customer profitability in a unified framework to empirically investigate the how and how much questions. By simultaneously modeling acquisition, retention and long-term profitability, the framework not only captures their interrelationship, but can also be used to make informed resource allocation decisions, which require tradeoffs between these key elements. These issues are explored in various business settings. Managers can use the proposed integrated framework not only for better understanding of profitability, but also know how to maximize profitability through optimal allocation of resources.

Biography:
Jacquelyn S. Thomas is an Associate Professor of Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC) at Northwestern University. She is both an avid researcher and teacher. In 2003 and 2004 she was awarded the IMC teacher of the year award. In 2006 she won the Marketing Science Institute H. Paul Root award for the best paper in the Journal of Marketing. She is on the editorial review board of the Journal of Marketing and has been a reviewer for the Journal of Marketing Research, Marketing Science, the International Journal of Research in Marketing, and the Journal of Interactive Marketing. Her research interests are in the areas of customer relationship management, marketing ROI analysis, customer lifetime value, database and direct marketing, and statistical modeling of the customer life cycle.

John Deighton

Brand Building and Interactive Marketing

In the future, it has been said, all marketing will be interactive marketing. Consumer brand building has been slow to agree. Traditionally, it been associated with broadcast media and network advertising. In this session, we will explore how principles of interactive marketing, together with the technologies of Internet communication, are being adopted by mainstream marketers. In particular my talk will draw on the experience of Unilever's $2.5 billion Dove brand in tackling a classical repositioning task using new media over a period of ten years. Prospects for interactive media and Implications for organization of the marketing function will be drawn.

Biography:
John Deighton is the Harold M. Brierley Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School, where he has been on the faculty since 1994. His Ph.D. is in marketing from the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. He is Editor of the Journal of Consumer Researc, and was the founding editor of the Journal of Interactive Marketing, jointly with Rashi Glazer.

He has published, among other journals, in the Journal of Consumer Research, the Journal of Marketing Research and the Journal of Marketing (where he received the alpha kappa psi award) on topics that include marketing strategy, database marketing and advertising. He has written cases on Hilton Hotels' frequent guest program, CVS.com, Snapple and Unilevers Dove brand among others. Prior to joining the Harvard Business School, he was on the faculties of the University of Chicago and the Amos Tuck School, Dartmouth College.

Koen Pauwels

The Long-Term Effects of Word-of-Mouth for a Social Network Site

Word-of-mouth (WOM) marketing has been touted as the worlds most effective, yet least understood marketing strategy (Misner 1999). Indeed, it combines the promise of overcoming consumer resistance with significantly lower costs and fast delivery especially through technology such as the Internet. Unfortunately, empirical evidence is currently scant regarding the relative effectiveness of WOM versus traditional marketing in increasing firm performance over time.

This research compares the long-term effects of WOM, event marketing and media coverage on member growth at an Internet social networking site. First, word-of-mouth referrals have substantially longer carryover effects than traditional marketing actions. Second, the long-run elasticity of signups to WOM is about 20 times higher than the elasticity for marketing events, and 30 times larger than that of media appearances. Third, the monetary value of a WOM referral is calculated, yielding an upper bound estimate for the financial incentives the firm might offer to stimulate word-of-mouth.

Biography:
Koen H. Pauwels, Associate Professor of Business Administration, Tucks School of Business, Dartmouth College, teaches and researches return on marketing investment and long-term marketing productivity. Current research projects include market dashboards, performance turnaround strategies, the profitability of promotions and price wars, retailer store brands, the impact of product innovation on stock market performance, and the effects of charging fees and of word-of-mouth for community- building websites. He applied these insights in industries such as automobiles, pharmaceuticals, online content and fast moving consumer goods. Koen serves on the Editorial Board of Journal of Marketing and of Marketing Science, won the O'Dell 2007 and EMAC 2001 best paper awards and publishes in Harvard Business Review, Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Retailing, Management Science and Marketing Science.

See our Call for Papers to nominate this year's Outstanding Educator by 6/15/07. Our awards ceremony also presents awards for Best Paper and Best Paper by a PhD Candidate.

Preview our Special Sessions & Events for Saturday's Case Writers' Workshop, the Networking Reception to follow, and the Sunday Luncheon Keynote.