STANFORD, Calif. – Stanford Graduate School of Business Marketing Professors V. “Seenu” Srinivasan and James Lattin, and their former doctoral student, Oded Netzer, were honored by the INFORMS Society for Marketing Science at its recent Marketing Science conference in Ann Arbor, Mich.
“It was a great evening for Stanford at the conference,” remarked Srinivasan, who is the Adams Distinguished Professor of Management. He is one of three scholars from around the country honored with the INFORMS Society for Marketing Science (ISMS) Fellow Award, given in recognition of “cumulative long-term contribution” to the understanding and practice of marketing. Nominees, who must have been a member of INFORMS/ISMS for at least 15 cumulative and 10 consecutive years, are evaluated based on contributions in four categories: research, education, service to and on behalf of ISMS, and practice.
In receiving the John D.C. Little Award for best marketing paper of 2008, Srinivasan was joined by coauthors Lattin, the Robert A. Magowan Professor of Marketing, and Netzer, now an associate professor of marketing at Columbia Business School. Their study, “A Hidden Markov Model of Customer Relationship Dynamics,” published in the March-April 2008 Marketing Science, breaks new ground in its examination of the effect of cumulative interactions between a company and its customers. Using a series of company-customer encounters as building blocks—for example, a sales or service transaction, an upgrade to the next class of service, a customer service call—the scholars develop a model to identify the customer’s state of relationship with the company and the consumer’s likelihood of purchase at any given time.
“Our model proposes an improved customer relationship management tool that analyzes the sequence of customer-firm interactions, and how such interactions could affect the dynamics of customer relationships and subsequent buying behavior,” said Netzer, who received the Frank M. Bass Award given to the best marketing paper derived from a PhD thesis published in an INFORMS-sponsored journal.
“It’s rare that the same paper receives both the Bass and Little Awards,” said ISMS President Richard Staelin, who is the Edward and Rose Donnell Professor of Business Administration at the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University. Staelin was among 10 recipients of last year’s Fellow Award, and chaired the selection committee for this year’s award. “The use of the discrete states provides a novel approach to classifying customers in a database; this has strong implications for firms that use databases to market to customers,” he said.
In addition to Srinivasan, two others were honored with 2009 Fellow Awards: Glen Urban, the David Austin Professor of Marketing and chairman of the Center for Digital Business at MIT; and Don Lehmann, the George E. Warren Professor of Business at Columbia Business School.
