Prof.dr. Stefan Stremersch received the prestigious “Insights Scientist of the Year” award. Bestowed every year by the Dutch Expertise Center for Marketing Insights, Research and Analytics, the award recognizes leading insights professionals in the Netherlands.
The jury considered Stefan’s research scientifically rigorous, highly innovative, and practically relevant.
This article introduces a new data enrichment method that combines revealed data on consumer demand and competitive reactions with stated data on competitive reactions to yet-to-be-enacted, unprecedented marketing policy changes. The authors extend the data enrichment literature to include stated competitive reactions, collected from subject-matter experts through a conjoint experiment. The authors apply their method to investigate hypothetical and unprecedented sales force policy changes of pharmaceutical companies. The results from the data enrichment method have high face validity and lead to various unique insights compared with using revealed data only. The authors find that only a very large sales force decrease initiated by the market leader triggers all competitors to decrease their sales force as well, leading to substantial profit increases for each firm. With respect to sales force allocation, when competitors decrease their sales force, they mainly decrease the reach of detailing across doctors, rather than decreasing the number of details to the most-visited doctors. The proposed data enrichment method provides managers with a powerful tool to, ex ante, predict the consequences of unprecedented marketing policy changes.
Elio Keko defended his dissertation in the Senate Hall at Erasmus University Rotterdam on Thursday, 7 September 2017 at 15:30. His supervisor was Prof. Stefan Stremersch and his co-supervisor was Dr Nuno Camacho. Other members of the Doctoral Committee are Prof. Benedict Dellaert (Erasmus School of Economics), Prof. Patrick Van Kenhove (University of Ghent), Prof. Stefan Wuyts (Koç University), Dr Ivan Guitart (Grenoble School of Management) and Dr Yvonne van Everdingen (Rotterdam School of Management).
Ralf van der Lans, Yvonne van Everdingen and Valentyna Melnyk
This paper investigates cross-country differences in the importance of four brand benefits that are commonly stressed in international positioning strategies—quality, uniqueness, leading position,
and growing popularity—in determining brand purchase intentions. It also investigates how these effects are moderated by country characteristics, consumer characteristics, and perceptions about competing brands’ benefits, as well as whether they are stable across product categories. To achieve this, we developed a hierarchical Bayesian model that recognizes the ordinal nature of the measurement of purchase intentions and captures scale usage differences in a parsimonious way. The model is estimated using a unique multi-continent, multi-category data set across 19,682 respondents from 25 countries. In total 337 brands across six product categories (fast food, beer, designer brands, athletic shoes and apparel, mobile phones, photography) and two service categories (airlines, credit cards) were assessed. The results show that on average intrinsic benefits (i.e., quality and uniqueness), are most important in determining purchase intentions. The strengths of these effects are significantly influenced by culture and become weaker if more competing brands are perceived to possess these benefits. Companies are therefore advised to trade-off between positioning their brand along a brand benefit that appeals to a country, while ensuring that this positioning is distinct from the positioning of competing brands. If a multinational company prefers using one global strategy, then focusing on quality is recommended.
ECMI receives ERIM funding to conduct research on factory closure in the automobile industry and on grassroots innovation.
Recent developments have increased the demands placed on individuals to plan for their own retirement. While traditionally many pension arrangements were organized collectively, now individuals are asked to take a more active and integral perspective on how to provide for a financially sound old age. In response, firms such as pension funds, insurers and financial advisors are looking for effective ways to assist individuals in this complex task.
Professors Benedict Dellaert and Bas Donkers have received a theme grant worth €250,000 from Netspar to support three part-time postdocs and extensive data collection on this topic. In the projects they will investigate promising choice architectures and online tools to match different pension trajectories more closely to different individuals’ needs. They address two key themes that are particularly relevant in the current pension context in the Netherlands. The first theme focuses on individuals’ mental integration of multiple risk components in choices between retirement plans (e.g., a state pension, an employer-based pension and a privately accrued pension). The second theme addresses individuals’ sequential choice of risk components in comprehensive retirement plans. Retirement planning takes place over the life span (e.g., when changing a job), and to cope with the risks involved, individuals can over time follow different decision strategies.
The research will be conducted in a close cooperation between researchers at the Erasmus School of Economics, the University of Alberta, University of South Carolina, and Netspar partners Achmea, APG, Robeco and Ortec Finance.
