Industry Cooperation

Together with our industry partners, we generate beneficial outcomes for all parties. By applying academic research tools and knowledge to industry cases we provide solutions and new insights for marketers.

A lot of companies today struggle with the amount of data they gather about their customers; and most of them lack the knowledge, time and resources to efficiently handle their data and generate insights. Quite often, our work starts with industry problems that we analyze and solve with academic designs and methods. We try to understand the underlying consumer behavior and marketing mechanics to extract concrete managerial implications for the companies. This way, we not only provide solutions to our partners but also enhance existing theories and develop new research frameworks.

In some settings, we try to integrate businesses into an academic setting, where we derive marketing solutions in the classroom. This aims at giving students an understanding of how to solve industry problems and providing a set of solutions to companies.

 Success Stories 

Our group analyzed different international Thermomix user communities to support the company in better understanding their core customers. We developed a model to find and classify highly influential users. By filtering this user list, one can easily identify the most influential users based on certain attributes. We further developed a dashboard that focuses on KPIs to examine community and influencer development.

Our team conducted a pilot project for improving prediction accuracy of CLV prediction. We tested and improved scalability of software implementation for the prediction and evaluated possible directions for future projects.

When eBay introduced the idea of creating communities of like-minded users on their platform, we were asked to measure the financial return on eBay communities. The core idea was that through these communities eBay created transparency in the market that allowed users to offer and purchase items of interest. These financial transactions served as financial measure in our project.