The data-rich marketing environment of today's business practice combined with the facilitated availability (and employability) of sophisticated decision making tools give rise to the emerging popularity of the marketing engineering approach to decision making. In this course, we focus on a very specific, but crucial aspect of marketing decision making, namely the efficient management of customer-firm relationships.
For many companies, the growing importance of "customer relationship management" (CRM) entailed a shift from a product-centric firm strategy towards focusing on the individual customer as the most critical unit of marketing decision making. Such customer-centric view sees customers as intangible assets of a firm, which need to be valued and managed carefully. CRM has therefore become a crucial focus for many companies as it promises to be a key determinant of future profitability.
However, one of the major difficulties in driving this shift from a product-centric approach towards a customer-centric mindset is the lack of technical skills. The topic of CRM entails a broad set of concepts that could not possibly be covered in one single course, which is why this course focuses on exploring the basic principles behind such concepts. More specifically, the course of Marketing Engineering and Marketing Models will expose students to the problems associated with customer-centricity and cover some of the models that can be used in studying and solving such problems.
In this course we address the strategic and operational principles that are at the heart of every successful CRM implementation. We will develop an understanding of concepts such as customer centricity, customer lifetime value, customer equity, or customer retention, and discuss how data-rich environments and data science (will) impact marketing practice. CRM strategy implementation in the areas of loyalty programs, services, and complaint management will be examined. The course will expose participants to an integrated view of CRM theory and practice, with case study analyses and a customer centricity simulation game constituting major course elements.