When Does Retargeting Work? Information Specificity in Online Advertising

Firms can now offer personalized recommendations to consumers who return to their website, using consumers' previous browsing history on that website. In addition, online advertising has greatly improved in its use of external browsing data to target Internet ads. Dynamic retargeting integrates these two advances by using information from the browsing history on the firm's website to improve advertising content on external websites. When surfing the Internet, consumers who previously viewed products on the firm's website are shown ads with images of those same products. To examine whether this is more effective than simply showing generic brand ads, the authors use data from a field experiment conducted by an online travel firm. Surprisingly, the data suggest that dynamic retargeted ads are, on average, less effective than their generic equivalents. However, when consumers exhibit browsing behavior that suggests their product preferences have evolved (e.g., visiting review websites), dynamic retargeted ads no longer underperform. One explanation for this finding is that when consumers begin a product search, their preferences are initially construed at a high level. As a result, they respond best to higher-level product information. Only when they have narrowly construed preferences do they respond positively to ads that display detailed product information. This finding suggests that in evaluating how best to reach consumers through ads, managers should be aware of the multistage nature of consumers' decision processes and vary advertising content along these stages.London Business School. Centre for MarketingNational Science Foundation (U.S.) (CAREER Award 1053398

Time preferences and the pricing of complementary durables and consumables

There is strong empirical evidence that consumers discount at significantly higher rates than firms. Yet, most research abstracts from the effect of discount rates on marketing decisions such as pricing. We study the effects of a consumers' discount rate that is higher than a firm's discount rate on prices, profits and consumer surplus of complementary products in four competitive settings and an infinite time setting: the firm is a monopolist or competes in the durable market and either ties the consumable to the durable or sells untied products. Our analysis yields five main results: First, a higher time preference of consumers than the firm never increases the optimal durable price and never decreases the optimal consumable price. Second, the optimal consumable price of tied goods is always higher than the optimal consumable price of untied goods, whereas the optimal durable price is always higher when goods are untied. Third, a higher time preference of consumers than the firm never increases profit, always decreases consumer surplus and, as a result, always decreases welfare. Fourth, the ability of the firm to commit to future prices and of consumers to commit to future purchases benefits both consumers and the firm. Fifth, if the firm competes in the durable market, then tying increases consumer surplus when consumers commit to purchasing the consumable. We discuss the implications of our results for firms' pricing strategies

Adoption and Usage of Online Services in the Presence of Complementary Offline Services: Retail Banking

The availability and variety of online services has increased dramatically in recent years. Many questions remain, however, regarding patterns of online service use, consumer preferences when using online services, and how consumers substitute between equivalent online and offline services. Using an extensive data set of consumer adoption and usage of the online banking service of a major German bank, this paper analyzes consumers' adoption and usage of online banking over the period August 2001 to July 2003, including the effect of demographics and branch banking on usage of online banking. We also examine the relationship between Internet availability and channel choice as well as usage. Finally, we analyze the effect of channel usage on customer level and product-specific revenues earned by the bank and derive revenue implications of online banking

Managing your customer’s tariff choice: what to do when your customers pay too much

Telecommunications companies traditionally offer several tariffs from which their customers can choose the tariff that best suits their preferences. Yet, customers sometimes make choices that are not optimal for them because they do not minimize their bill for a certain usage amount. We show in this paper that companies should be very concerned about choices in which customers pick tariffs that are too small for them because they lead to a significant increase in customers churn. In contrast, this is not the case if customers choose tariffs that are too big for them. The reason is that in particular flat-rates provide customers with the additional benefit that they guarantee a constant bill amount that consumption can be enjoyed more freely because all costs are already accounted for

Stuck in the Adoption Funnel: The Effect of Interruptions in the Adoption Process on Usage

Many firms have introduced Internet-based customer self-service applications such as online payments or brokerage services. Despite high initial sign-up rates, not all customers actually shift their dealings online. We investigate whether the multistage nature of the adoption process (an “adoption funnel”) for such technologies can explain this low take-up. We use exogenous variation in events that possibly interrupt adoption, in the form of vacations and public holidays in different German states, to identify the effect on regular usage of being interrupted earlier in the adoption process. We find that interruptions in the early stages of the adoption process reduce a customer's probability of using the technology regularly. Our results suggest significant cost-saving opportunities from eliminating interruptions in the adoption funnel.NET InstituteLondon Business School. Centre for MarketingMack Center for Managing Technological InnovationDeutsche Forschungsgemeinschaf

Stuck in the Adoption Funnel: The Effect of Delays in the Adoption Process on Ultimate Adoption

Online applications and services automate communications and transactions between rms and consumers, promising large efficiency gains. However, consumers have been slow to use these online technologies intensively, despite widespread adoption of the internet. Customers frequently undergo a staggered adoption process that may involve sign-up, experimentation, trial, and substantial usage until they fully embrace internet services. We ask whether delays in moving through the initial stages of this adoption process contribute to consumers ultimately not using the service intensively. Such behavior would be consistent with laboratory findings on consumer memory. We explore this question using data from a German retail bank where only 24% of the customers who sign up for the bank's online banking service use it substantially. We use exogenous variation in delays in the adoption process, caused by vacations and public holidays in different German states, to identify this effect. We find that delays in the early stages of adoption significantly reduce a customer's probability of moving to substantial usage: A 10-day delay of a customer's first online login reduces the likelihood that she will ever use the technology substantially, by 33%. This eect is more severe for demographic groups with less online experience

Adoption and Usage of Online Services in the Presence of Complementary Offline Services: Retail Banking

The availability and variety of online services has increased dramatically in recent years. Many questions remain, however, regarding patterns of online service use, consumer preferences when using online services, and how consumers substitute between equivalent online and offline services. Using an extensive data set of consumer adoption and usage of the online banking service of a major German bank, this paper analyzes consumers' adoption and usage of online banking over the period August 2001 to July 2003, including the effect of demographics and branch banking on usage of online banking. We also examine the relationship between Internet availability and channel choice as well as usage. Finally, we analyze the effect of channel usage on customer level and product-specific revenues earned by the bank and derive revenue implications of online banking

Advertising to Early Trend Propagators: Evidence from Twitter

In the digital economy, influencing and controlling the spread of information is a key concern for firms. One way firms try to achieve this is to target firm communications to consumers who embrace and propagate the spread of new information on emerging and `trending' topics on social media. However, little is known about whether early trend propagators are indeed responsive to firm-sponsored messages. To explore whether early propagators of trending topics respond to advertising messages, we use data from two field tests conducted by a charity and an emerging fashion firm on the micro-blogging service Twitter. On Twitter, 'promoted tweets' allow advertisers to target individuals based on the content of their recent postings. Twitter continuously identifies in real time which topics are newly popular among Twitter users. In the field tests, we collaborated with a charity and a fashion firm to target ads at consumers who embraced a Twitter trend early in its life-cycle by posting about it, and compared their behavior to that of consumers who posted about the same topic only later on. Throughout both field tests, we consistently find that early propagators of trends are less responsive to advertising than consumers who embrace trends later

On-ice vibroseis and snowstreamer systems for geoscientific research

We present implementations of vibroseis system configurations with a snowstreamer for over-ice long-distance seismic traverses (>100 km). The configurations have been evaluated in Antarctica on ice sheet and ice shelf areas in the period 2010–2014. We discuss results of two different vibroseis sources: Failing Y-1100 on skis with a peak force of 120 kN in the frequency range 10–110 Hz; IVI EnviroVibe with a nominal peak force of 66 kN in the nominal frequency range 10–300 Hz. All measurements used a well-established 60 channel 1.5 km snowstreamer for the recording. Employed forces during sweeps were limited to less than 80% of the peak force. Maximum sweep frequencies, with a typical duration of 10 s, were 100 and 250 Hz for the Failing and EnviroVibe, respectively. Three different concepts for source movement were employed: the Failing vibrator was mounted with wheels on skis and pulled by a Pistenbully snow tractor. The EnviroVibe was operated self-propelled on Mattracks on the Antarctic plateau. This lead to difficulties in soft snow. For later implementations the EnviroVibe with tracks was put on a polyethylene (PE) sled. The sled had a hole in the center to lower the vibrator baseplate directly onto the snow surface. With the latter setup, data production varied between 20 km/day for 6-fold and 40 km/day for single fold for 9 h/day of measurements. The combination of tracks with the PE-sled was especially advantageous on hard and rough surfaces because of the flexibility of each component and the relatively lose mounting. The systems presented here are suitable to obtain data of subglacial and sub-seabed sediment layers and englacial layering in comparable quality as obtained from marine geophysics and land-based explosive surveys. The large offset aperture of the streamer overcomes limitations of radar systems for imaging of steep along-track subglacial topography. With joint international scientific and logistic efforts, large-scale mapping of Antarctica's and Greenland's subglacial geology, ice-shelf cavity geometries and sea-bed strata, as well as englacial structures can be achieved