Co-experience Network Dynamics: Lessons from the Dance Floor.

Experience and socialization are key factors in determining customer commitment and renewal decisions in the service sector. To analyse the combined effect of experience and socialization, in this paper we introduce the concept of co-experience networks. A new methodological approach, originally applied in the field of social ethology, is devised to study reality-mined co-experience networks. By analysing a network of health club members over four years, we find that long-experienced clients have a lower chance to renew their contracts. On the other hand, central members in the co-experience network are stable and tend to renew their memberships. Further, since the members of the same reference group align their levels of commitment, renewal decisions are clustered in a small-world network. These findings contribute to our understanding of social dynamics and localized conformity in customer decision-making that can be used to plan marketing strategies to improve customer retention.

Knowledge Management at ENI: a Case Study of Managing Knowledge in an International Oil and Gas Company

International oil and gas companies operate in a competitive environment where superior performance demands that opportunities be identified, evaluated and exploited to minimise time to market and create value for the stakeholders. To do so such companies rely on their human resources, state of the art technology, advanced management systems, innovation and knowledge to maintain competitive advantage. Oil and gas companies have long recognised the importance of knowledge management in achieving this goal. To the forefront of these oil and gas companies is Eni, which is one of the largest oil companies in the world. This paper represents an opportunity to gain a unique insight into Eni\u27s knowledge management system, providing key metrics that describe the use of the system by 8,000 workers across 39 countries and describing the vision for the knowledge management system moving into the future

Peer Influence and Knowledge Management in Communities of Users and Practices

Knowledge is highly dispersed in companies, customer networks and, more generally, in markets. Various forms of knowledge influence collective results: experiential knowledge derived from shared socialization, practical knowledge, and scientific knowledge. This work aims at better understanding of how these types of knowledge affect collective results in communities of customers and of practice. In particular, collective results are interpreted on one hand as individual commitments in communities of customers, and, on the other, companies’ success in rapidly solving problematic urgencies through communities of practice. First, the effect of both experience and socialization is examined in the service sector, in order to investigate how the social structures of communities of customers influence commitment and retention. Second, communities of practice operating in high-risk sectors are analyzed to look for improvements in their structure by aiding the recombination of dispersed knowledge and more rapid access to those skills and competences required to solve urgent problem-solving processes. Various methods and tools are used to deal with these issues. In particular, cross network analyses and new methodological approaches, originally applied in the field of social ethology, are applied to study reality-mined data collected by radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags. In addition, a set of recently developed non-parametric methods is devised to deal with new methodological problems arising in studying socialization in networks. Recent debates in the marketing literature have emphasized methodological criticalities in discriminating between peer influence, homophily, and other confounding factors in real-world social settings. A whole chapter is devoted to a methodological contribution to these debates

Experience, socialization and customer retention: Lessons from the dance floor

Experience and socialization are key factors in customer commitment and defection decisions. To study the effect of experience and social relationships on customer retention, we analyze a reality-mined co-presence network of health club members over a period of 4 years. Since central customers in the network have more social ties they will lose if they defect, we use centrality as a proxy for customer relationship switching costs. We find that long-standing customers do have a lower chance of renewing their contracts. However, in line with theoretical predictions (Burnham et al., Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science 31(2):109–126, 2003), the consumer’s centrality in the network (reflecting a social cost of defection) reduces customer churn rate. This study’s results indicate that the inclusion of social effects increases the predictive power of the customer churn model (Nitzan and Libai, Journal of Marketing 75(6):24–38, 2011), thus contributing to our understanding of the role social networks play in customer decisions