This paper presents an empirical examination of the relationship between brand equity and customer acquisition, retention, and profit margin, the key components of customer lifetime value (CLV), as well as the role of marketing in this relationship. We examine a unique database from the U.S. automobile market, comprised of 10 years of survey-based brand equity measures as well as acquisition ra...

The goal of this paper is to provide an ontological approach to modelling customer relationships, which helps managers optimize channels, improve customer acquisition, retention and add-on selling. The advantages of a systematic approach are multiple. Modelling and mapping customer relationships allows a better understanding of the way a company interacts with its customers. A formal descriptio...

The basic models of price dispersion due to Butters (1977) and Varian (1980), further developed by Narasimhan (1988), have been applied to a broad range of issues in industrial organization and marketing. Much of the previous research assumes that the captive and switcher segments are exogenously symmetric or asymmetric. We embed the Varian (1980) model in a broader setting that considers how c...

Many induction problems, such as on-line customer profiling, include missing data that can be acquired at a cost, such as incomplete customer information that can be filled in by an intermediary. For building accurate predictive models, acquiring complete information for all instances is often prohibitively expensive or unnecessary. Randomly selecting instances for feature acquisition allows a ...

In today’s quickly changing and increasingly competitive market place, it is imperative that manufacturers keep abreast of the technological advances and design innovations incorporated into competing product lines. The term competitive assessment (or benchmarking) has been coined by manufacturers to describe the process of ethically acquiring, inspecting, analyzing, instrumenting, and testing ...