Publications

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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.... View Details

Keywords: Customer Retention; Churn; Customer Relationship Management; Measurement and Metrics

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July–August 2024
Article

Doing More with Less: Overcoming Ineffective Long-Term Targeting Using Short-Term Signals

By: Ta-Wei Huang and Eva Ascarza

Firms are increasingly interested in developing targeted interventions for customers with the best response, which requires identifying differences in customer sensitivity, typically through the conditional average treatment effect (CATE) estimation. In theory, to... View Details

Keywords: Long-run Targeting; Heterogeneous Treatment Effect; Statistical Surrogacy; Customer Churn; Field Experiments; Consumer Behavior; Customer Focus and Relationships; AI and Machine Learning; Marketing Strategy

October 2024
Article

Canary Categories

By: Eric Anderson, Chaoqun Chen, Ayelet Israeli and Duncan Simester

Past customer spending in a category is generally a positive signal of future customer spending. We show that there exist “canary categories” for which the reverse is true. Purchases in these categories are a signal that customers are less likely to return to that... View Details

Keywords: Churn; Churn Management; Churn/retention; Assortment Planning; Retail; Retailing; Retailing Industry; Preference Heterogeneity; Assortment Optimization; Customers; Retention; Consumer Behavior; Forecasting and Prediction; Retail Industry

27 Oct 2023
News

‘We Made Every Mistake’: This Brooklyn Couple Churned up a $40M Ice Cream Business Before Tumbling Into Bankruptcy — Now They’re Rebuilding. Here Are 3 Lessons You Can Learn From Their Story

January 2017 (Revised October 2021)
Case

Delivering the Goods at Shippo

By: Jeffrey J. Bussgang, Jeffrey F. Rayport and Olivia Hull

Laura Behrens Wu, CEO of software start-up Shippo, prepares her pitch for a Series A funding round following a successful seed round. Customer adoption of Shippo’s e-commerce dashboard application, which allows small and medium retailers to compare delivery rates... View Details

Educators

2014
Other Teaching and Training Material

Marketing Reading: Customer Management

By: Sunil Gupta

This Reading on customer management sheds light on how companies should evaluate and manage their customers in order to grow profitably. Customer management allows marketing managers to inform investment decisions by drilling down into each customer's profitability or... View Details

Keywords: Customer Acquisition; Customer Churn; Customer Profitability Analysis; Customer Retention; Firm Value; Organizational Structure

July 2010 (Revised January 2017)
Background Note

Marketing Analysis Toolkit: Customer Lifetime Value Analysis (2024)

By: Thomas Steenburgh and Jill Avery

Customers are increasingly being viewed as assets that bring value to the firm. Customer lifetime value is a metric that allows managers to understand the overall value of their customer base and relate it to three customer strategies firms employ: asset... View Details

Keywords: Customer Lifetime Value; Return On Investment; Customer Acquisition; Customer Retention; Customer Churn; ＂Marketing Analytics＂; Marketing; Customer Relationship Management; Customer Focus and Relationships; Customer Value and Value Chain; Management Analysis, Tools, and Techniques; Marketing Strategy; Measurement and Metrics; Strategic Planning; Value

Educators

December 2018 (Revised June 2021)
Supplement

Bulb 2017: Launch

By: John R. Wells and Benjamin Weinstock

On August 21, 2015, Amit Gudka and Hayden Wood, co-founders of Bulb Ltd. (Bulb) launched a new business to supply energy to the United Kingdom’s 27 million residential homes with a promise of 100% renewable electricity at affordable prices. By the end of March 2017,... View Details

December 2018 (Revised June 2021)
Case

Bulb 2015: Foundation

By: John R. Wells and Benjamin Weinstock

In late August 2015, Amit Gudka and Hayden Wood, co-founders of Bulb, Ltd (Bulb), were ready to offer affordable renewable energy to the United Kingdom’s 27 million households. They hoped to capitalize on the hundreds of thousands of customers switching their energy... View Details

Educators

Awards

Finalist, Weitz-Winer-O'Dell Award

By: Eva Ascarza

Finalist for the 2021 Weitz-Winer-O'Dell Award for “The Perils of Proactive Churn Prevention Using Plan Recommendations: Evidence from a Field Experiment” (Journal of Marketing Research (JMR), 2016) with Raghuram Iyengar and Martin Schleicher. View Details

December 2018 (Revised June 2021)
Supplement

Bulb 2018: Hypergrowth

By: John R. Wells and Benjamin Weinstock

After a wild and volatile year, Bulb, a new entrant in the UK residential energy market, ended March 2018 with 329,171 properties, 1.2% of the total residential energy market). This was 150% ahead of a plan for 130,000 properties and almost ten times the size the... View Details

Winter 2014
Article

Does Service Bundling Reduce Churn?

By: Jeff Prince and Shane Greenstein

We examine whether bundling in telecommunications services reduces churn using a series of large, independent cross sections of household decisions. To identify the effect of bundling, we construct a pseudo-panel dataset and utilize a linear, dynamic panel-data model,... View Details

Keywords: Communication Technology; Customer Satisfaction; Product Marketing; Telecommunications Industry