Customer Evolution in Sales Channel Migration

This research has been triggered by an emergent trend in customer behavior: customers have rapidly expanded their channel experiences and preferences beyond traditional channels (such as stores) and they expect the company with which they do business to have a presence on all these channels. This evidence has produced an increasing interest in multichannel customer behavior and it has motivated several researchers to study the customers’ channel choices dynamics in multichannel environment. We study how the consumer decision process for channel choice and response to marketing communications evolves for a cohort of new customers. We assume a newly acquired customer’s decisions are described by a “trial” model, but the customer’s choice process evolves to a “post-trial” model as the customer learns his or her preferences and becomes familiar with the firm’s marketing efforts. The trial and post-trial decision processes are each described by different multinomial logit choice models, and the evolution from the trial to post-trial model is determined by a customer-level geometric distribution that captures the time it takes for the customer to make the transition. We utilize data for a major retailer who sells in three channels – retail store, the Internet, and via catalog. The model is estimated using Bayesian methods that allow for cross-customer heterogeneity. This allows us to have distinct parameters estimates for a trial and an after trial stages and to estimate the quickness of this transit at the individual level. The results show for example that the customer decision process indeed does evolve over time. Customers differ in the duration of the trial period and marketing has a different impact on channel choice in the trial and post-trial stages. Furthermore, we show that some people switch channel decision processes while others don’t and we found that several factors have an impact on the probability to switch decision process. Insights from this study can help managers tailor their marketing communication strategy as customers gain channel choice experience. Managers may also have insights on the timing of the direct marketing communications. They can predict the duration of the trial phase at individual level detecting the customers with a quick, long or even absent trial phase. They can even predict if the customer will change or not his decision process over time, and they can influence the switching process using specific marketing tools

Digital marketing: le nuove opportunità di business per le aziende nell'era del web 2.0

L’elaborato ha lo scopo di presentare le nuove opportunità di business offerte dal Web. Il rivoluzionario cambiamento che la pervasività della Rete e tutte le attività correlate stanno portando, ha posto le aziende davanti ad un diverso modo di relazionarsi con i propri consumatori, che sono sempre più informati, consapevoli ed esigenti, e con la concorrenza. La sfida da accettare per rimanere competitivi sul mercato è significativa e il mutamento in rapido sviluppo: gli aspetti che contraddistinguono questo nuovo paradigma digitale sono, infatti, velocità, mutevolezza, ma al tempo stesso misurabilità, ponderabilità, previsione. Grazie agli strumenti tecnologici a disposizione e alle dinamiche proprie dei diversi spazi web (siti, social network, blog, forum) è possibile tracciare più facilmente, rispetto al passato, l’impatto di iniziative, lanci di prodotto, promozioni e pubblicità, misurandone il ritorno sull’investimento, oltre che la percezione dell’utente finale. Un approccio datacentrico al marketing, attraverso analisi di monitoraggio della rete, permette quindi al brand investimenti più mirati e ponderati sulla base di stime e previsioni. Tra le più significative strategie di marketing digitale sono citate: social advertising, keyword advertising, digital PR, social media, email marketing e molte altre. Sono riportate anche due case history: una come ottimo esempio di co-creation in cui il brand ha coinvolto direttamente il pubblico nel processo di produzione del prodotto, affidando ai fan della Pagina Facebook ufficiale la scelta dei gusti degli yogurt da mettere in vendita. La seconda, caso internazionale di lead generation, ha permesso al brand di misurare la conversione dei visitatori del sito (previa compilazione di popin) in reali acquirenti, collegando i dati di traffico del sito a quelli delle vendite. Esempio di come online e offline comunichino strettamente.

Essays in Empirical Political Economics

This thesis takes two perspectives on political institutions. From the one side, it examines the long-run effects of institutions on cultural values. From the other side, I study strategic communication, and its determinants, of politicians, a pivotal actor inside those institutions. The first chapter provides evidence for the legacy of feudalism - a set of labor coercion and migration restrictions -, on interpersonal distrust. I combining administrative data on the feudal system in the Prussian Empire (1816 – 1849) with the geo-localized survey data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (1980 – 2020). I show that areas with strong historical exposure to feudalism have lower levels of inter-personal trust today, by means of OLS- and mover specifications. The second chapter builds a novel dataset that includes the Twitter handles of 18,000+ politicians and 61+ million tweets from 2008 – 2021 from all levels of government. I find substantial partisan differences in Twitter adoption, Twitter activity and audience engagement. I use established tools to measure ideological polarization to provide evidence that online-polarization follows similar trends to offline-polarization, at comparable magnitude and reaches unprecedented heights in 2018 and 2021. I develop a new tool to demonstrate a marked increase in affective polarization. The third chapter tests whether politicians disseminate distortive messages when exposed to bad news. Specifically, I study the diffusion of misleading communication from pro-gun politicians in the aftermath of mass shootings. I exploit the random timing of mass shootings and analyze half a million tweets between 2010 – 2020 in an event-study design. I develop and apply state-of-the-art text analysis tools to show that pro- gun politicians seek to decrease the salience of the mass shooting through distraction and try to alter voters’ belief formation through misrepresenting the causes of the mass shootings.

Identification of sunflower genotypes suitable for organic agriculture and development of analytical tools for their traceability

Thanks to the development and combination of molecular markers for the genetic traceability of sunflower varieties and a gas chromatographic method for the determination of the FAs composition of sunflower oil, it was possible to implement an experimental method for the verification of both the traceability and the variety of organic sunflower marketed by Agricola Grains S.p.A. The experimental activity focused on two objectives: the implementation of molecular markers for the routine control of raw material deliveries for oil extraction and the improvement and validation of a gas chromatographic method for the determination of the FAs composition of sunflower oil. With regard to variety verification and traceability, the marker systems evaluated were the following: SSR markers (12) arranged in two multiplex sets and SCAR markers for the verification of cytoplasmic male sterility (Pet1) and fertility. In addition, two objectives were pursued in order to enable a routine application in the industrial field: the development of a suitable protocol for DNA extraction from single seeds and the implementation of a semi-automatic capillary electrophoresis system for the analysis of marker fragments. The development and validation of a new GC/FID analytical method for the determination of fatty acids (FAME) in sunflower achenes to improve the quality and efficiency of the analytical flow in the control of raw and refined materials entering the Agricola Grains S.p.A. production chain. The analytical performances being validated by the newly implemented method are: linearity of response, limit of quantification, specificity, precision, intra-laboratory precision, robustness, BIAS. These parameters are used to compare the newly developed method with the one considered as reference - Commission Regulation No. 2568/91 and Commission Implementing Regulation No. 2015/1833. Using the combination of the analytical methods mentioned above, the documentary traceability of the product can be confirmed experimentally, providing relevant information for subsequent marketing.