New Insights into Customer Management I
(A2019-9146)

AUTHORS

Michael Haenlein, ESCP Europe

ABSTRACT

In the last decade customer management has gone through a considerable change to the extent it can be described as "turmoil". New technologies enable firms to collect customer-related information like never before, and novel methods are developed to profitably reach the right customer at the right time. Firms begin to realize the importance of new devices such as smartphones and tablets as well as the unique challenges posed by them, including the adoption of mobile apps and digital payment systems.

In the first presentation (The Effect of Weather on Users’ Online Behavior), Steffen Foersch, Bernd Skiera and Klaus Miller look at the impact of weather on online behavior. Based on an analysis of 8 billion online ad impressions the authors show that weather impacts both time spent online and device usage behavior (i.e., switch from desktop to mobile devices) as well as ad impressions due to its impact on mood.

The second talk by Xian Gu and P. K. Kannan (The Dark Side of Mobile App Adoption: Examining the Impact on Customers’ Multichannel Purchase) looks at mobile applications (apps). By analyzing a hotel chain the authors look into the impact of mobile app adoption on omni-channel spending. They find that app adoption has a significant negative impact on total customer spending, which may be caused by the adoption of competitor apps in addition to the app of the focal firm.

The third paper (Modeling the Diffusion of Mwallets for Developed and Emerging Markets: Marketing Potential and Strategic Implications), co-authored by V. Kumar, Nandini Nim and Amit Agarwal, looks at the diffusion of mobile application based payment systems or Mwallets. These authors compare the diffusion of Mwallets at Point of Sales terminals among 32 developed and emerging countries in order to identify the key factors which can explain the diffusion of Mwallets.

In the final paper, Mayank Nagpal, J. Andrew Petersen and Arvind Rangaswamy (From Words to Indices: Measuring Digitization from Corporate Reports), use textual analysis to develop an index for measuring the degree of digitization of a firm. The authors compile a dictionary of phrases that reflects the strategic intent of senior management of firms regarding digitization and use it to measure and rank-order the extent of digitization of firms in different industries based on publicly available annual reports of those firms.