Marketing Analytics
Advertising Over Time: Moving in the speed-of-life?
Author(s):
Leonie Gehrmann, Florian Stahl
Cooperation Partners:
Hebrew University (Israel), Economist
Description:
We analyze how print advertising content has adapted to changes in speed-of-life, best defined as the “rapidity and density of experiences, meanings, perceptions, and activities” (Werner et al. 1985), over time.
On the one hand, the development of our image mining algorithm promises relevance for a variety of alternative use cases, since it is easily extendable to images beyond the print advertisements in our data set. Similarly, the analysis could be continued for other magazines, as well as social media postings, further refining our algorithm. On the other hand, our research also has direct implications for marketing practice. Increasing advertising clutter is a largely recognized phenomenon and our findings are likely to provide insights into the existing competition for consumer attention.
The Impact of the Offered Product Mix on the Acquisition, Usage and Retention of Information Goods
Author(s):
Daniela Schmitt, Raghuram Iyengar, Florian Stahl
Cooperation Partners:
Wharton School (Philadelphia)
Description:
A primary challenge for information goods providers (e.g., news websites) is maintaining a balance between their free users and paid subscribers by determining which of the former are likely to convert to the latter and when. We address questions of what kinds of content do users consume and how much do the inter-session consumption dynamics impact if/
Theoretically, our results help understand different users' responses in usage behavior to product mix changes both in the short and in the long run. From a managerial perspective, our results provide actionable implications for firms that employ the freemium business model (e.g. newspaper websites, video or music streaming services) on how a change in their product mix can impact the user experience and behavior.
A friendly turn: advertising bias in the news media
Author(s):
Florens Focke, Alexandra Niessen-Ruenzi, Stefan Ruenzi
Cooperation Partners:
Chair of International Finance & Chair of Corporate Governance
Description:
This paper investigates whether newspapers report more favorably about advertising corporate clients than about other firms. Our identification strategy based on high-dimensional fixed effects and high frequency advertising data shows that advertising leads to more positive press coverage. This advertising bias in reporting is found among local and national newspapers. Further results show that advertising bias manifests particularly in less negative reporting after bad news events such as negative earnings surprises or extremely negative stock returns. Our findings cast doubt on the independence of the press from corporate pressure and hint at important information frictions.
Prediction of Consumer Behavior
Author(s):
Cooperation Partners:
Chair of Sales & Services Marketing
Description:
Gaining insights into predictors of a customer’s purchase behavior and personal traits enables a more flexible and adaptive approach to the sales process. Utilizing data on behavioral patterns, consumer characteristics and self-reported traits, we aim to understand and anticipate customer behavior in an app-based context. This is made possible by the application of machine learning algorithms to the enriched data set and leads to a better understanding of mechanisms underlying consumer decisions and the leveraging of predictive abilities in the optimization of the sales process.
Applications arise in many areas, in which behavioral patterns can be observed and more enriched customer data could possibly be gathered. This data, whilst valuable, remains often unsaved and unexplored. Insights may be valuable, both from a customer and provider perspective, as optimized processes lead to higher customer satisfaction and operational efficiency.
Marketing in Finance
Author(s):
Cooperation Partners:
Chair of Sales & Services Marketing
Description:
Skillful communication with participants of financial markets enables the development of new financing sources and ameliorated sentiment towards a company’s activities and value potential. Well-executed promotion in the context of Investor Relations can reduce opportunity costs when going public and afterwards drive stock returns as well as ease return volatility.
High-quality Investor Relations (IR) can be a critical success factor for corporations with high exposure to reception in the financial community. Firms aiming to undergo an Initial Public Offering (IPO) as well as firms, which are already listed, are legally bound to provide filings to authorities and the public, that can be utilized as a means of communication and promotion of a firm’s value potential. Crawling large amounts of textual data and deploying methodologies of textual analysis, we aim to explore, how marketing should be communicating in the frame of Investor Relations.
Maximizing Customer Lifetime Value through Strategic Channel Management: How to Incentivize Customers to Use a Mobile App versus a Website
Author(s):
Cooperation Partners:
Chair of Sales & Services Marketing
Description:
Customer engagement with mobile devices has changed customers' habits in online purchasing, in particular the usage of mobile apps for shopping increases the customer lifetime value (CLV). Hence, we suggest the idea that online retailers should steer their customers to the mobile channel by offering a permanent discount over the mobile app. Although this strategy decreases the short-term income, it may increase the CLV. Based on this suggestion, we develop a probability-based CLV model to show to what type of customers an online retailer should offer a discount over the mobile app as well as the optimal value of that discount.
Following an analytical modeling approach, we are able to show that the online retailer should offer such a discount to a customer who is either very likely or unlikely to increase her purchasing probability. Also, the firm could offer such a discount to encourage the customer to switch to the mobile app. Online retailers should not offer the discount to those who already have a high purchasing probability because their CLV is already huge. Last but not least, an online retailer should not follow this strategy to gain new customers (customer acquisition) but rather apply it to increase customer retention.
Variation in review writing behavior across time-of-the-day, week day, season, weather conditions, a city’s life-quality and other factors
Author(s):
Andreas Bayerl, Florian Stahl, Jacob Goldenberg
Cooperation Partners:
IDC Israel, Kununu.de
Description:
We analyze a data set of in total more than 10 Mio online reviews from two different platforms collecting User-Generated Content to find differences in review writing behavior across time-of-the-day, week day, season, weather conditions, a city’s life quality and other factors. Online reviews are meant to be an unbiased source of information. We will show how in fact, they can be influenced by externalities that have nothing or very little to do with the reviewed instance. By doing so we will follow a suggestion by Miller (2011) from his Science article saying that the power of the Internet and unstructured data can help take research to the next level. Methods employed during this project are among others, web scraping to acquire data, Natural Language Processing (NLP) to analyze data and Machine Learning to develop a model predicting review scores based on externalities.
Ad-blockers and Content Differentiation
Author(s):
Gokhan Gecer, Florian Kraus, Pinar Yildirim
Cooperation Partners:
Wharton School (Philadelphia)
Description:
An increasing number of people use ad-blockers recently which becomes a threat to the main revenue stream of publishers. In order to deal with this challenge, some publishers offer an ad-free (premium) version of their websites to customers who pay a subscription fee. Others ask the users to turn off their ad-blocker. We have developed a game-theoretical model of a media ecosystem that contains publishers and users. Publishers maximize their profits from advertising income and/
The results show that when producing content is costly, the publisher decreases its content quality, accordingly the number of users who consume the content decreases. Hence, the publisher offers a subscription option to the users. In a duopoly market, the substitutability of the content is also important. Our results show that when a publisher produces less substitutable content for a low cost (YouTubers and bloggers), it does not offer a subscription option. On the other hand, when the content is more substitutable (newspapers and tabloids) and when the content is less substitutable but it is costly to produce it (websites with a specific focus), the publisher offers a subscription option.