Marketing Professor Joseph Pancras Receives Prestigious 2008 Donald R. Lehmann Award
San Diego, CA (8/16/2008) - The American Marketing Association has announced that marketing professor Dr. Joseph Pancras has received the prestigious 2008 Donald R. Lehmann award for "Optimal Marketing Strategies for a Customer Data Intermediary," a paper he co-authored with Yale's K. Sudhir and which was published in the November 2007 issue of the Journal of Marketing Research. The Lehmann award is presented annually to the best dissertation-based article in one of two premier journals – Journal of Marketing or Journal of Marketing Research. Pancras received the award from the Marketing Research Special Interest Group at a special awards ceremony at the American Marketing Association Summer Educators' Conference in San Diego on Friday, August 8th.
In this paper, Pancras rigorously investigated marketing strategies of central relevance to a new and emerging industry – firms known as "customer data intermediaries" (CDIs). Customer data intermediaries are firms that collect customer data to offer customer-specific marketing services to marketers in order to improve marketing efficiency. With advances in computer and communications technology and the emergence of the Internet, marketing strategies are being increasingly driven by customer information and several types of customer data intermediaries have emerged in response to this trend. Pancras visualized this trend very early on and began empirical research in this area before most other scholars.
Using state of the art tools in econometrics and game theory, Dr. Pancras was able to identify potential growth opportunities for intermediary firms. This paper developed an empirical framework to evaluate the optimal customer (exclusive/non-exclusive), product (quality or accuracy of the customization) and pricing strategy for a CDI. It found that selling on a non-exclusive basis using the maximum available purchase history data is the most profitable strategy for the CDI in the particular market that was analyzed.
The paper also took the next step of studying the potential impact of retailers entering the CDI business, and found that it is optimal for the retailer to undercut the prices of a 'pure play' CDI. We are already seeing some evidence of such moves among retailers in the marketplace with Kroger'’ tie-up with dunnHumby. While Catalina Marketing is an obvious example of a CDI that will benefit from this paper’s strategic analysis, the recent purchase of another CDI, Doubleclick, by Google illustrates the relevance of the paper's framework to the current marketplace.
PHOTO: UConn Marketing Professor Joseph Pancras accepts the Lehmann award from Professor Donald R. Lehmann, George E. Warren Professor of Business, Columbia Business School.
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