Essays on multichannel marketing

Multichannel marketing is the practice of simultaneously offering information, goods, services, and support to customers through two or more synchronized channels. In this dissertation, I develop an integrated framework of multichannel marketing and develop models to assist managers in their marketing resource allocation decisions. In the first essay of the dissertation, I investigate the factors that drive customers multichannel shopping behavior and identify its consequences for retailers. In the second essay, I build on this work and develop a model that enables firms to optimize their allocation of marketing resources across different customer-channel segments. In the first essay, I develop a framework comprising the factors that drive consumers’ channel choice, the consequences of channel choice, and their implications for managing channel equity. The results show that customer-channel choice is driven in a nonlinear fashion by a customer demographic variable such as age and is also influenced by consumer shopping traits such as number of categories bought and the duration of relationship with a retailer. I show that by controlling for the moderating effects of channel-category associations, the influence of customers’ demographics and shopping traits on their channel choices can vary significantly across product categories. Importantly, the results show that multichannel shoppers buy more often, buy more items, and spend considerably more than single channel shoppers. The channel equity of multichannel customers is nearly twice that of the closest single channel customers (online or offline). In the second essay, I propose a model for optimal allocation of marketing efforts across multiple customer-channel segments. I first develop a set of models for consumer response to marketing efforts for each channel-customer segment. This set comprises four models, the first for purchase frequency, the second for purchase quantity, the third for product return behavior, and the fourth for contribution margin of purchase. The results show that customers’ responses to firm marketing efforts vary significantly across the customer-channel segments. They also suggest that marketing efforts influence purchase frequency, purchase quantity and monetary value in different ways. The resource allocation results show that profits can be substantially improved by reallocating marketing efforts across the different customer-channel segments

An Intelligent Reconnaissance Framework for Homeland Security

The cross border terrorism and internal terrorist attacks are critical issues for any country to deal with. In India, such types of incidents that breach homeland security are increasing now a day. Tracking and combating such incidents depends only on the radio communications and manual operations of security agencies. These security agencies face various challenges to get the real-time location of the targeted vehicles, their direction of fleeing, etc. This paper proposes a novel application for automatic tracking of suspicious vehicles in real-time. The proposed application tracks the vehicle based on their registration number, type, colour and RFID tag. The proposed approach for vehicle recognition based on image processing achieves 92.45 per cent accuracy. The RFID-based vehicle identification technique achieves 100 per cent accuracy. This paper also proposes an approach for vehicle classification. The average classification accuracy obtained by the proposed approach is 93.3 per cent. An integrated framework for tracking of any vehicle at the request of security agencies is also proposed. Security agencies can track any vehicles in a specific time period by using the user interface of the application

Essays on multichannel marketing

Multichannel marketing is the practice of simultaneously offering information, goods, services, and support to customers through two or more synchronized channels. In this dissertation, I develop an integrated framework of multichannel marketing and develop models to assist managers in their marketing resource allocation decisions. In the first essay of the dissertation, I investigate the factors that drive customers multichannel shopping behavior and identify its consequences for retailers. In the second essay, I build on this work and develop a model that enables firms to optimize their allocation of marketing resources across different customer-channel segments. In the first essay, I develop a framework comprising the factors that drive consumers’ channel choice, the consequences of channel choice, and their implications for managing channel equity. The results show that customer-channel choice is driven in a nonlinear fashion by a customer demographic variable such as age and is also influenced by consumer shopping traits such as number of categories bought and the duration of relationship with a retailer. I show that by controlling for the moderating effects of channel-category associations, the influence of customers’ demographics and shopping traits on their channel choices can vary significantly across product categories. Importantly, the results show that multichannel shoppers buy more often, buy more items, and spend considerably more than single channel shoppers. The channel equity of multichannel customers is nearly twice that of the closest single channel customers (online or offline). In the second essay, I propose a model for optimal allocation of marketing efforts across multiple customer-channel segments. I first develop a set of models for consumer response to marketing efforts for each channel-customer segment. This set comprises four models, the first for purchase frequency, the second for purchase quantity, the third for product return behavior, and the fourth for contribution margin of purchase. The results show that customers’ responses to firm marketing efforts vary significantly across the customer-channel segments. They also suggest that marketing efforts influence purchase frequency, purchase quantity and monetary value in different ways. The resource allocation results show that profits can be substantially improved by reallocating marketing efforts across the different customer-channel segments

AN AYURVEDIC REVIEW ON JANAPADODHWAMSA

Ayurveda the eternal life science from many centuries proved to be the most efficient tool in the health management system. It gives more weightage to the prevention than the cure. Janapadodhwamsa is one among the unique concept described in Ayurveda treatises which literally means demolition or annihilation of people or community. Acharya Charaka called it Janapadodhwamsa, Acharya Sushruta called it Maraka, and Acharya Bhela called it Janamaar. There are four factors that have been described which are common and essential for every living being, that is, Vayu (air), Jala (water), Desha (land), and Kaala (season). Among these four factors, Kaala is mainly main factor. Any abnormal alteration in these four factors can significantly influence individual or community or environment or all of them together. Vitiation of these four common factors is the cause for Janapadodhwamsa. Foremost reason for Janapadodhwamsa has been described as Adharma (immorality) and the root cause of Adharma is said to be Pragyaparadha (delinquency of wisdom). Considering the note worthiness of Janapadodhwamsa, a whole chapter has been depicted in CharakaSamhita illustrating its onset, causes, peculiar features, and management. Its causative agents, method of prevention has been clearly explained. To manage Janapadodhvamsa, it is advised to include the usage of Rasayana therapy, Panchkarama procedures, SadvritPaalan (code of right conducts), and Aachara Rasayana, that is, behavioral therapy

Cross-temporal Detection of Novel Ransomware Campaigns: A Multi-Modal Alert Approach

We present a novel approach to identify ransomware campaigns derived from attack timelines representations within victim networks. Malicious activity profiles developed from multiple alert sources support the construction of alert graphs. This approach enables an effective and scalable representation of the attack timelines where individual nodes represent malicious activity detections with connections describing the potential attack paths. This work demonstrates adaptability to different attack patterns through implementing a novel method for parsing and classifying alert graphs while maintaining efficacy despite potentially low-dimension node features.Comment: Preprint. Under Revie

Crafting integrated multichannel retailing strategies,

ABSTRACT Multichannel retailing is the set of activities involved in selling merchandise or services to consumers through more than one channel. Multichannel retailers dominate today's retail landscape. While there are many benefits of operating multiple channels, these retailers also face many challenges. In this article, we discuss the key issues concerning multichannel retailing, including the motivations and constraints of going multichannel, the challenges of crafting multichannel retailing strategies and opportunities for creating synergies across channels, key retail mix decisions facing multichannel retailers, and the dynamics of multichannel retailing. We synthesize current knowledge drawn from the academic literature and industry practice, and discuss potential directions for future research.

Outsourcing of Customer-Facing CRM Processes: When and How Does It Impact Shareholder Value?

One central business activity that companies increasingly outsource is the information systems (IS) function. Previous research has shown that outsourcing of back-office IS generally has a positive effect on shareholder value of the outsourcing firm. Much less is known about the performance implications of outsourcing of another important IS function, namely, front-office customer relationship management (CRM) systems, where the vendor uses its own personnel and software to perform several CRM tasks. Previous, largely anecdotal evidence shows that the performance implications of outsourcing CRM range from very negative to very positive. To address this unsatisfactory state of knowledge, we provide and empirically test a contingency perspective on the performance implications of outsourcing CRM processes. We do so using the event-study methodology. The results are largely consistent with our contingency model. CRM outsourcing is more beneficial to firms that are high on information technology capabilities and low on marketing capabilities, and less beneficial when it concerns presales CRM. Similarly, although vendor economic distance has a positive influence on the outsourcing firm's shareholder value, vendor cultural distance has a negative influence. These effects are in turn significantly moderated by the type of CRM process outsourced. This paper was accepted by Sandra Slaughter, information systems. </jats:p