Webinars
MSI Webinar: Firms’ Focus on Brand and Customer Management: Measurement, Development, and Financial Consequences
An ongoing, inconclusive debate in strategic marketing research centers on the relative importance of brand management versus customer management—two key dimensions of marketing strategy. Yet few empirical findings actually detail what firms do strategically, how their strategic foci have evolved, or what the consequences have been for their financial performance. Using longitudinal data collected from computer-aided text analyses of nearly 100.000 earnings conference call transcripts involving more than 2000 firms over 17 years, together with data coding and secondary data, the authors demonstrate that brand and customer management are distinct dimensions of a marketing strategy. These foci exhibit characteristic patterns at industry levels, with growing importance in recent years; customer management exhibits more substantial increases. We demonstrate the structural antecedents to these two approaches as well as the firm performance implications. Our findings establish not only the prevalence of different marketing strategies but also their economic implications, thus revealing more effective approaches to ensure marketing strategies yield the intended firm performance outcomes.
speaker
Werner Reinartz is Chaired Professor of Marketing at the University of Cologne, and the Director of the Center for Research in Retailing (IFH), Germany. Professor Reinartz holds a Ph.D. in Marketing from the University of Houston (1999). He is a leading academic voice on how firms interact with their customers. His research interest is at the intersection of marketing strategy, CRM, digital marketing, and retailing. In particular, he is interested in the questions of how firms can compete successfully in mature markets, marketing mix efficiency and effectiveness, and the successful management of lasting, profitable customer relationships. His work in these domains has been recognized with major academic awards, such as the AMA Doctoral Dissertation Award, the Don Lehmann Award, twice the MSI/Paul Root Award, the Varadarajan Award for Early Career Contributions, the Sheth Foundation/Journal of Marketing Award for long-term contribution to the marketing discipline, the IJRM J.B. Steenkamp Award for Long-Term Impact, and the ISBM-David Wilson-Sheth Foundation Award for Long Term Impact in B2B Marketing. He is one of the highest-cited researchers in marketing academia outside the US and is regularly listed amongst the top-economists in Germany. Werner has been a co-editor at the International Journal of Research in Marketing and longstanding area editor and ERB member for many top marketing journals. He is the author of the widely used Springer text-book “CRM – Concept, Strategy, and Tools”. His practice-oriented research has been reflected in more than 25 publications in the Harvard Business Press System.