Essays on consumer personalization. Essay 1. The personalization services firm: What to sell, whom to sell to and for how much? Essay 2. A nested consideration model for analyzing store and brand choice. Essay 3. The competitive implications of consideration effects.

摘要

Essay 1: The Personalization Services Firm: What to Sell, Whom to Sell to and For How Much?; Personalization services such as individual-specific advertising and couponing are a growth market. Some personalization service firms offer their services on an exclusive basis to manufacturers in a product category while others offer it on a non-exclusive basis. Some restrict the length of purchase history data used for personalization, while others use very long purchase histories. Despite these differences, there is little empirical guidance on what is the optimal business strategy for a particular firm.; This essay offers an empirical framework to help a personalization services firm choose the right strategy. We find that, for a personalized coupon vendor in grocery retailing, personalization using the maximum available purchase history data on a non-exclusive basis is the most profitable strategy.; It also enables the firm to identify new types of future competitors. For example, we find that the retailer can use the profit increase from personalization activities of manufacturers to subsidize the sale of personalized coupon services, and that retailers may therefore be the most potent competitive threat to personalized coupon vendors in grocery retailing.; Essay 2: A Nested Consideration Model For Analyzing Store And Brand Choice.; Managers of retail stores routinely face the problem of introducing new SKUs and deleting non-performing SKUs from their shelves. How a change in product assortment will affect store patronage (choice and wallet share) of households is a critical piece of information that managers routinely need.; Extant research has explored the role of distance of stores for consumers and on the role of price promotions in affecting store choice. However, the role of product assortment has received little attention in the literature, even though this information can be critical in answering the routine problem of product assortment choice facing managers. We therefore develop a model that enables us to investigate the relative effects of location, product assortment and price promotions on store patronage. We find that our model has better predictive performance than the model used in extant research, and thus has potential to help solve these important issues for the retail manager.; Essay 3: The Competitive Implications Of Consideration Effects.; Recommendations on managerial decisions made by several decision support systems (DSS) developed in the marketing literature depend upon implicit assumptions about the response of consumers to the marketing decisions of retailers and manufacturers. These DSS model heterogeneity of choice parameters among consumers and consumer state dependence in choice, but they do not model local consumer response, i.e., consumer response to the marketing mix variables of smaller subsets of alternatives.; In this essay we examine whether the assumption of globality of consumer response can substantially affect the important metrics which DSS use to make recommendations. We find that modeling local response can substantially change several of these metrics even when parameter heterogeneity and state dependence are accounted for. We conclude that to preserve the optimality of managerial decisions, future DSS should incorporate local consumer response into the characterization of consumer choice.