Thorsten Wiesel

Marketing's profit impact: Quantifying online and offline funnel progression

Inofec, a small-to medium-sized enterprise in the business-to-business sector, desired a more analytic approach to allocate marketing resources across communication activities and channels. We developed a conceptual framework and econometric model to empirically investigate 1 the marketing communication effects on off-line and online purchase funnel metrics and 2 the magnitude and timing of the profit impact of firm-initiated and customer-initiated contacts. We find evidence of many cross-channel effects, in particular, off-line marketing effects on online funnel metrics and online funnel metrics on off-line purchases. Moreover, marketing communication activities directly affect both early and later purchase funnel stages website visits, online and off-line information, and quote requests. Finally, we find that online customer-initiated contacts have substantially higher profit impact than off-line firm-initiated contacts. Shifting marketing budgets toward these activities in a field experiment yielded net profit increases 14 times larger than those for the status quo allocation.

Practice Prize Paper---Marketing's Profit Impact: Quantifying Online and Off-line Funnel Progression

Inofec, a small-to medium-sized enterprise in the business-to-business sector, desired a more analytic approach to allocate marketing resources across communication activities and channels. We developed a conceptual framework and econometric model to empirically investigate 1 the marketing communication effects on off-line and online purchase funnel metrics and 2 the magnitude and timing of the profit impact of firm-initiated and customer-initiated contacts. We find evidence of many cross-channel effects, in particular, off-line marketing effects on online funnel metrics and online funnel metrics on off-line purchases. Moreover, marketing communication activities directly affect both early and later purchase funnel stages website visits, online and off-line information, and quote requests. Finally, we find that online customer-initiated contacts have substantially higher profit impact than off-line firm-initiated contacts. Shifting marketing budgets toward these activities in a field experiment yielded net profit increases 14 times larger than those for the status quo allocation.

The role of consumer confidence in creating customer loyalty

How can firms retain customers during recessions? To answer this question, we investigate the moderating role of consumer confidence (CC) on the effects of three types of crucial customer loyalty strategies. These strategies are value equity (VE), brand equity (BE), and relationship equity (RE), collectively called customer equity drivers (CEDs). We build on economics and marketing theories to develop our hypotheses on the concerned moderating role. A meta-analysis is used to synthesize the multilevel results of 13 service industries and to test the hypotheses. In addition, we use several robustness checks to validate the findings of the meta-analysis. The results consistently show that CC partly influences the effects of CEDs on customer loyalty and this influence varies across industries. These findings suggest that managers in service industries should consider CC as an important criterion for effectively adjusting customer loyalty strategies to their specific situation. Specifically, during recessions, when CC is relatively low, VE is effective for retaining customers, but this is more apparent for noncontractual settings than for contractual settings. Also, BE is more effective but only for noncontractual firms.

Marketing's profit impact

Inofec, a small-to medium-sized enterprise in the business-to-business sector, desired a more analytic approach to allocate marketing resources across communication activities and channels. We developed a conceptual framework and econometric model to empirically investigate 1 the marketing communication effects on off-line and online purchase funnel metrics and 2 the magnitude and timing of the profit impact of firm-initiated and customer-initiated contacts. We find evidence of many cross-channel effects, in particular, off-line marketing effects on online funnel metrics and online funnel metrics on off-line purchases. Moreover, marketing communication activities directly affect both early and later purchase funnel stages website visits, online and off-line information, and quote requests. Finally, we find that online customer-initiated contacts have substantially higher profit impact than off-line firm-initiated contacts. Shifting marketing budgets toward these activities in a field experiment yielded net profit increases 14 times larger than those for the status quo allocation.

Device Switching in Online Purchasing : Examining the Strategic Contingencies

The increased penetration of mobile devices has a significant impact on customers’ online shopping behavior, with customers frequently switching between mobile and fixed devices on the path to purchase. By accounting for the attributes of the devices and the perceived risks related to each product category, the authors develop hypotheses regarding the relationship between device switching and conversion rates. They test the hypotheses by analyzing clickstream data from a large online retailer and apply propensity score matching to account for self-selection in device switching. They find that when customers switch from a more mobile device, such as a smartphone, to a less mobile device, such as a desktop, their conversion rate is significantly higher. This effect is larger when product category–related perceived risk is higher, when the product price is higher, and when the customers experience with the product category and the online retailer is lower. The findings illustrate the importance of focusing on conversions across the combination of devices used by customers on their path to purchase. Focusing on the conversions on a single device in isolation, as is usually done in practice, significantly overestimates conversions attributed to fixed devices at the expense of those attributed to mobile devices.