Using advancements in marketing analytics to master challenges in the society and business

Quantitative marketing research has a long tradition to focus its analysis on individual customers as this is the smallest unit of interest. The final goal is to develop tools that provide guidance on how to tailor marketing-mix variables like prices or advertisement campaigns directly to each customer. New data at the customer level are generated every day due to the emergence of e-commerce and the digitization of purchases. This provides a vast amount of opportunities to apply marketing analytics methods at the customer level.These advancements in marketing analytics are, however, not limited to optimizing marketing-mix variables alone but also allow to address societal challenges and other business problems. With the starting grant I plan to further develop and apply marketing analytics methods in order to address two specific challenges for the society and business. First, I want to examine how food policies affect households’ consumption by inducing them to make healthier and more sustainable food purchases. In one specific study, I will employ marketing analytics with the aim to reduce unhealthy (sugary) food consumption in order to fight obesity in the society. Furthermore, this stream of research also aims to study how households can be incentivized to a more sustainable consumption in terms of ecological impact or animal welfare. Second, I plan to develop analytical tools for managing customer cancellations in order to optimize the allocation of scarce capacities and thus reduce the waste of resources. This allows me to develop two streams of research in marketing within the next years that are methodically related but address different challenges.

Keywords:Warning labels, Obesity, Customer cancellations, Marketing Analytics

Disciplines:Marketing models, Applied economics not elsewhere classified