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- June 23, 2021
- Article
Research: When A/B Testing Doesn't Tell You the Whole Story
By: Eva Ascarza
When it comes to churn prevention, marketers traditionally start by identifying which customers are most likely to churn, and then running A/B tests to determine whether a proposed retention intervention will be effective at retaining those high-risk customers. While...
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Keywords:
Customer Retention;
Churn;
Targeting;
Market Research;
Marketing;
Investment Return;
Customers;
Retention;
Research
- March 2021
- Case
Chime Solutions
Just two years after launching their 10k by 2020 initiative to hire 10,000 employees by 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic forced Chief Executive Officer Mark Wilson to send nearly all of his staff at Chime Solutions (Chime) to work from home. Chime was a customer contact...
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- March 17, 2021
- Other Article
Beyond Pajamas: Sizing Up the Pandemic Shopper
By: Ayelet Israeli, Eva Ascarza and Laura Castrillo
A first look at how the COVID-19 pandemic impacted e-commerce apparel shopping in the US and the UK. Extensive analysis and interactive graphics utilizing millions of transactions.
While the pandemic is still playing out, our preliminary investigations... View Details
While the pandemic is still playing out, our preliminary investigations... View Details
Keywords:
Retail;
Retail Analytics;
Consumer;
Pandemic;
COVID;
COVID-19;
Apparel;
Ecommerce;
E-commerce;
Online Shopping;
Online Apparel;
Online Sales;
Returns;
CRM;
Customer Retention;
Customer Experience;
Customer Value;
Digital;
Customer Focus and Relationships;
Customers;
Health Pandemics;
Consumer Behavior;
Customer Relationship Management;
Online Technology;
Behavior;
Retail Industry;
Apparel and Accessories Industry;
Technology Industry;
United States;
United Kingdom
- 2021
- Working Paper
Harbinger Categories
By: Eric Anderson, Chaoqun Chen, Ayelet Israeli and Duncan Simester
Past spending by a customer is generally a positive signal of future spending at the same retailer. We show that there exist “Harbinger Categories” for which the reverse is true. The more purchases customers make in these categories, the less likely these customers are...
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- January 2021 (Revised March 2021)
- Supplement
E-Commerce Analytics for CPG Firms (C): Free Delivery Terms
By: Ayelet Israeli and Fedor (Ted) Lisitsyn
The E-Commerce Analytics group at the traditional CPG firm was in charge of compiling various online sales reports, as well as making data-driven recommendations for sales and marketing tactics. In a series of exercises, students address different data challenges for...
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Keywords:
Data;
Data Analysis;
Data Analytics;
Data Sharing;
CPG;
Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG);
Delivery Planning;
Customer Lifetime Value;
Online Channel;
Retail;
Retail Analytics;
Retailing Industry;
Ecommerce;
Grocery;
Grocery Delivery;
Margins;
Retention;
Data and Data Sets;
Analysis;
Retail Industry;
Consumer Products Industry;
United States
- January 2021 (Revised March 2021)
- Exercise
E-Commerce Analytics for CPG Firms (C): Free Delivery Terms
By: Ayelet Israeli and Fedor (Ted) Lisitsyn
The E-Commerce Analytics group at the traditional CPG firm was in charge of compiling various online sales reports, as well as making data-driven recommendations for sales and marketing tactics. In a series of exercises, students address different data challenges for...
View Details
Keywords:
Data;
Data Analysis;
Data Analytics;
Data Sharing;
CPG;
Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG);
Delivery Planning;
Customer Lifetime Value;
Online Channel;
Retail;
Retail Analytics;
Retailing Industry;
Ecommerce;
Grocery;
Grocery Delivery;
Margins;
Data and Data Sets;
Retention;
Retail Industry;
Consumer Products Industry;
United States
- 2020
- Working Paper
The Twofold Effect of Customer Retention in Freemium Settings
By: Eva Ascarza, Oded Netzer and Julian Runge
The main tradeoff in designing freemium services is how much of the product to offer for free. At the heart of such a tradeoff is the balancing act of providing a valuable free product in order to acquire and engage consumers, while making the free product limited...
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- September–October 2020
- Article
Managing Churn to Maximize Profits
By: Aurelie Lemmens and Sunil Gupta
Customer defection threatens many industries, prompting companies to deploy targeted, proactive customer retention programs and offers. A conventional approach has been to target customers either based on their predicted churn probability or their responsiveness to a...
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- June 2020
- Background Note
Customer Management Dynamics and Cohort Analysis
By: Elie Ofek, Barak Libai and Eitan Muller
The digital revolution has allowed companies to amass considerable amounts of data on their customers. Using this information to generate actionable insights is fast becoming a critical skill that firms must master if they wish to effectively compete and win in today’s...
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- May 2020
- Article
Sales Leadership During and After the Crisis
Because customer acquisition and retention are the lifeblood of a for-profit enterprise, sales activities establish foundational conditions for a business. In turn, sales managers’ responsibilities in a crisis extend beyond keeping the lights on. Their leadership makes...
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- April 2020 (Revised June 2020)
- Case
Oriental Land Co., Ltd.—Tokyo Disney Resort
By: Ramon Casadesus-Masanell and Akiko Kanno
This case describes the history of Oriental Land Co. Ltd.’s (OLC's) Tokyo Disney Resort (TDR), its operations, the extent of vertical integration, and the challenges it faced in 2018 as OLC's chairman and CEO, Toshio Kagami, contemplated how best to deal with...
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Keywords:
Strategy For Multi-business Firm;
Business Models;
Growth;
Theme Parks;
Disney;
Disney Parks;
Licensing;
Royalties;
Two-part Tariffs;
Oriental Land Co.;
Tokyo Disneyland;
Tokyo DisneySea;
Tokyo Disney Resort;
Tokyo Disney;
Growth Strategy;
Hotels;
Hotel Industry;
Partnership;
Development;
Attractions;
Rides;
Urayasu;
Kagami;
Congestion;
Pricing;
Amusement Parks;
Amusement Park Industry;
Brand;
Branding;
History;
OLC;
Corporate Strategy;
Competitive Strategy;
Business History;
Price;
Retention;
Growth and Development;
Growth and Development Strategy;
Brands and Branding;
Agreements and Arrangements;
Contracts;
Operations;
Vertical Integration;
Problems and Challenges;
Partners and Partnerships;
Business Strategy;
Expansion;
Rail Transportation;
Transportation Networks;
Accommodations Industry;
Entertainment and Recreation Industry;
Tourism Industry;
Asia;
Japan;
Tokyo;
United States
- September 2019 (Revised June 2020)
- Case
Othellonia: Growing a Mobile Game
In the summer of 2019, Yu Sasaki, Head of the Game Division of DeNA, a Japanese mobile gaming company, is evaluating various growth strategies for its recent game Othellonia. Sasaki needs to decide if he should focus on customer acquisition, retention, or monetization.
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- August 2019
- Article
When and How to Diversify—A Multicategory Utility Model for Personalized Content Recommendation
By: Yicheng Song, Nachiketa Sahoo and Elie Ofek
Sometimes we desire change, a break from the same or an opportunity to fulfill different aspects of our needs. Noting that consumers seek variety, several approaches have been developed to diversify items recommended by personalized recommender systems. However,...
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- 2021
- Working Paper
Improving Customer Compatibility with Tradeoff Transparency
By: Ryan W. Buell and MoonSoo Choi
Through a large-scale field experiment with 393,036 customers considering opening a credit card account with a nationwide retail bank, we investigate how providing transparency into an offering’s tradeoffs affects subsequent rates of customer acquisition and long-run...
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- February 2019 (Revised July 2019)
- Case
Sales Force Management at Nobel Ilac
By: Doug J. Chung and Gamze Yucaoglu
Nobel Ilac was a Turkish generic pharmaceutical company marketing more than 100 drugs in 20 countries and, as of 2017, had over 2,500 employees worldwide. Nobel had implemented a transformation strategy—more specifically, a customer segmentation plan—whereby the sales...
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- February 2019
- Teaching Note
Talent@Tencent
By: Tarun Khanna
Late in 2016, two senior human resources (HR) executives at Tencent Holdings (Tencent), China’s leading Internet services firm, are assessing the effectiveness of the company’s talent management practices in responding to Tencent’s sustained hypergrowth. Over the...
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- March 2018
- Article
In Pursuit of Enhanced Customer Retention Management: Review, Key Issues, and Future Directions
By: Eva Ascarza, Scott A. Neslin, Oded Netzer, Zachery Anderson, Peter S. Fader, Sunil Gupta, Bruce Hardie, Aurelie Lemmens, Barak Libai, David T. Neal, Foster Provost and Rom Schrift
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....
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- February 2018
- Article
Retention Futility: Targeting High-Risk Customers Might Be Ineffective.
By: Eva Ascarza
Companies in a variety of sectors are increasingly managing customer churn proactively, generally by detecting customers at the highest risk of churning and targeting retention efforts towards them. While there is a vast literature on developing churn prediction models...
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- January 2018 (Revised January 2020)
- Case
People Analytics at McKinsey
By: Jeffrey T. Polzer and Olivia Hull
A private equity–backed fast food chain has hired McKinsey’s new People Analytics group to help it improve performance. As the final client workshop approaches, Associate Partner Alex DiLeonardo ponders the best way to present the team’s findings, especially those that...
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Keywords:
Talent and Talent Management;
Customer Relationship Management;
Forecasting and Prediction;
Cost Management;
Human Resources;
Employees;
Recruitment;
Retention;
Selection and Staffing;
Measurement and Metrics;
Performance;
Performance Capacity;
Performance Efficiency;
Performance Evaluation;
Performance Improvement;
Consulting Industry;
Service Industry
- January–February 2018
- Article
Some Customers Would Rather Leave Without Saying Goodbye
By: Eva Ascarza, Oded Netzer and Bruce G.S. Hardie
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...
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