Monetizing Marketing Assets and Customer Experiences in Digital Environments
(A2021-102328)

AUTHORS

Daniela Schmitt, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania; Marc Fischer, University of Cologne; Michael Haenlein, ESCP Europe; Michaela Draganska, LeBow College of Business, Drexel University

ABSTRACT

The growth of digital media channels has led to an increasingly competitive online landscape where players are vying for users’ attention and in which the monetization of marketing assets and customer experiences has become an increasingly complex task. This special session assembles research projects that leverage data from digitalization to the full extent and show that this data should be an essential component and basis for decision-making during the assessment and optimization of marketing strategies. Evaluating the Firm Brand Exploitation Strategy: A Value-based Approach by Marc Fischer, Simone Wies, Max Backhaus, Tobias Hornig Although prior research has well established that brands can significantly contribute to firm value, little knowledge exists about the underlying mechanism by which they do so. A thorough understanding about the underlying value drivers, however, is important for designing an appropriate value-based brand exploitation strategy, especially in the hypercompetitive digital environment brands operate nowadays. This paper presents an empirical study about how firms align their exploitation strategy with the requirements of the capital market and derives implications for digital brand strategies. Brand Image Mining: A Solution for Brand Logo Detection Using Convolutional Neural Networks by Jochen Hartmann, Amos Schikowsky, Mark Heitmann, Michael Haenlein The presence of images featuring brand logos in social media is rapidly proliferating. Reliably detecting brand logos at scale is relevant for marketing researchers interested in visual brand presence (e.g., campaign tracking, influencer marketing). We summarize extant literature on image mining, present an open-source state-of-the-art technology for brand logo detection, and highlight with a managerial real-world use case the superiority of our solution over text-based approaches. The Role of Social Media in the Monetization of News Content by Daniela Schmitt, Michaela Draganska Social media has taken over the function of a news provider for many. Additionally, publishers face the issue of finding ways to generate revenues, mainly through direct payments in the form of subscriptions. Using a detailed data set combining social media posts with click-stream data on user behavior on a news website, we explore the influence of social media on subscriptions. How Much Content Should Be Paid? Managing Freemium Along the Customer Journey by Daniela Schmitt Little is known about how companies that offer subscriptions to their digital content can influence consumers along their customer journey and increase their customer base by adapting marketing activities, primarily their digital content design. Using data from an online news publisher that offers both free and paid content, we empirically quantify how content composition relates to customer behavior at different stages of the customer journey.