Understanding, Expanding, and Predicting Customer Engagement

A WCAI Research Opportunity Sponsored by an International Beauty Retailer

October 17, 2014
Noon – 1pm US Eastern Time

Register here

The Wharton Customer Analytics Initiative is excited to announce a unique dataset from an International Beauty Retailer that allows for an unprecedented view into how customers’ relationships with a retail brand evolve.

This dataset contains comprehensive customer interaction information for 85,000 randomly selected customers and prospects from 6 different countries, and includes:

·         Complete purchase history, tied to individual customers, including offline & online

·         Direct mail and email campaigns, addressable to customers, including creatives

·         Detailed product hierarchy and store details, including openings & closing

·         Responses to customer satisfaction survey

·         Complete customer data for 2 full years

The research sponsor sells a unique, exclusive line of beauty products and their ideal customer develops a strong loyalty to particular products or lines of products. This anonymized data will be provided by competitive proposal to 6-10 research teams who want to study these problems (or any others related to the sponsor’s business).

Through this Research Opportunity, the sponsor wishes to better understand:

·         what makes customers “fall in love” with their products

·         ways to expand the relationship by encouraging customers to purchase a broader range of products

·         how direct marketing and promotion affects the evolution of the relationship

·         how to predict when the relationship is in danger of ending

·         methods to recruit and develop more valuable prospective customers

To learn more about the company and the dataset, interested faculty, doctoral students, and other researchers can attend a live webinar on October 17, 2014 from 12:00-1:00pm US Eastern. During the webinar, the data will be described in detail, and executives from the Corporate Sponsor will be available for Q&A.  Register for the webinar here.

Interested researchers should submit proposals online through the WCAI Proposal Submission Portal by November 3, 2014 to be considered for access to the data. Proposals will be evaluated based on their potential for academic contribution and the researchers’ ability to address issues of strategic importance to the program sponsor. A committee including representatives from the Corporate Sponsor, Rajdeep Grewal (Penn State University), Eric Bradlow (The Wharton School), Pete Fader (The Wharton School), and Elea McDonnell Feit (Drexel University) will select the teams to receive the data.

Researchers are encouraged to review proposal submission guidelines and FAQs before submitting their proposal. Additional questions on the data or the process can be directed to wcai-research@wharton.upenn.edu.

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