Lifetime-value creation through a customized offer adressed to diferent lifestyles

This paper purposes a method for marketing segmentation based on customers‟ lifestyle. A quantitative and qualitative segmentation established by the Whitaker Lifestyle™ Method was created in order to define a concrete and clear identification of the customer, by understanding the behavior, style and preferences of each segment. After conducting 18 in-depth interviews, it was concluded that four main personas characterize the customer base of the company. These four personas will be the support for the creation of „quick-wins‟ that address to the expectations of each lifestyle, projecting a significant impact on the lifetime-value of the company‟s customer bas

The Spatial Self: Location-Based Identity Performance on Social Media

This is the author's final manuscript. Copyright 2014 SAGE PublicationsAs a growing number of social media platforms now include location information from their users, researchers are confronted with new online representations of individuals, social networks, and the places they inhabit. To better understand these representations and their implications, we introduce the concept of the “spatial self”: a theoretical framework encapsulating the process of online self-presentation based on the display of offline physical activities. Building on previous studies in social science, humanities, and computer and information science, we analyze the ways offline experiences are harnessed and performed online. We first provide an encompassing interdisciplinary survey of research that investigates the relationships between location, information technology, and identity performance. Then, we identify and characterize the spatial self as well as examine its occurrences through three case studies of popular social media sites: Instagram, Facebook, and Foursquare. Finally, we offer possible research directions and methodological considerations for the analysis of geocoded social media data

Consumer decision making in restaurant selection

The aim of this study was to investigate consumers’ decision of selecting a restaurant for leisure. It was based on research carried out in the South East of the UK. In line with the cognitive paradigm the importance of attributes was approached from the theoretical perspective of utility theory in which consumers pursue maximisation of benefits from the service which they are evaluating. This study follows a sequential mixed methods approach. It consists of a qualitative stage followed by a quantitative stage, each one adhering to the precepts of their own paradigms. The qualitative stage was based on data collected through six focus groups of four to six respondents. An interview guide was used in semi-structured settings and data was analysed using applied thematic analysis. The second stage employed an online survey generating quantitative data from 376 respondents. The theme of ‘eating out occasion’, such as a romantic dinner, was a key element of the decision-making process. This thesis presents a framework for examining the different stages of the decision using the stylised Engels, Kollat and Blackwell (EKB) model (Tuan-Phan and Higgins, 2005). Its stages delve into the influence of emotions, motivations and the consumer’s regulatory focus in the decision. The methodological design with the possibility of selecting attributes, emerging from the qualitative stage, offers a contribution to the use of conjoint analysis for complex decisions. The study also proposes a new typology of restaurant attributes, with seven categories influencing perceived consumer value. The study’s findings further indicate that price is a factor influencing the expectations from the other attributes. The study considers a number of implications for the industry, such as, the importance of service and consumers’ willingness to pay more for a service that is friendly, welcoming and attentive. It also suggests many areas for further research

Friends don't lie: inferring personality traits from social network structure

In this work, we investigate the relationships between social network structure and personality; we assess the performances of different subsets of structural network features, and in particular those concerned with ego-networks, in predicting the Big-5 personality traits. In addition to traditional survey-based data, this work focuses on social networks derived from real-life data gathered through smartphones. Besides showing that the latter are superior to the former for the task at hand, our results provide a fine-grained analysis of the contribution the various feature sets are able to provide to personality classification, along with an assessment of the relative merits of the various networks exploited.European Commission (PERSI Project within the Marie Curie COFUND-FP7)Italy. Ministero dell'istruzione, dell'università e della ricerca (FIRB S-PATTERNS project