What Should Marketers Read? 3 Selections from UMD’s Wendy Moe

September 18, 2017

Wendy Moe is Professor of Marketing at the Robert H. Smith School of Business, University of Maryland, where she also directs the master’s program in marketing analytics. A recognized expert in online marketing and social media, she is the author of Social Media Intelligence and her research has appeared in numerous leading journals.

She has consulted for many corporations and government agencies, helping them develop and implement statistical models for web analytics, social media intelligence, and forecasting. She is a frequent speaker at MSI conferences, and co-led a July 2016 workshop at Facebook.

“As organizations are collecting more and more data on their customers, the challenge of extracting actionable insights is becoming more daunting,” she says. “The key to overcoming this challenge is to focus on fundamental marketing questions and to design the data analysis around answering those questions. Below are three articles that move us forward on that path.”

Recommended readings
1
“The Effect of Electronic Word of Mouth on Sales: A Meta-Analytic Review of Platform, Product, and Metric Factors,” by Ana Babić Rosario, Francesca Sotgiu, Kristine De Valck, and Tammo H.A. Bijmolt (2016), Journal of Marketing Research

“The body of research on electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) has been growing rapidly, and it is not clear from any one research study what the impact of word-of-mouth is to your organization. Various researchers have focused on different aspects of eWOM effects, and as a result, the collection of studies often show different results. This paper revisits these previous studies in a meta-analysis to identify effects that are common across previous research while identifying factors, such as platform or product characteristics, that can influence how eWOM affects sales. For example, eWOM has a stronger effect on new tangible products than new services.”

 

2
“Understanding Customer Experience throughout the Customer Journey,” by Katherine N. Lemon and Peter C. Verhoef (2016), Journal of Marketing 

“Many members may already be familiar with this article as it was written by MSI’s former Executive Director and an Academic Trustee. However, the topic of mapping out the larger customer journey is such an important and significant shift in how marketers think about our customers that it bears repeating. What I like about this paper is that it expands our thinking around the customer relationship. Marketers have traditionally had a transactional focus where customers were characterized by a series of purchases. The focus has been on the purchasing funnel preceding each transaction and the repeat transactions that potentially follow.

“This paper encourages us to think more about the overall relationship with the customer, regardless of whether or not they are currently in the midst of a purchasing decision. The authors provide a framework of the entire customer journey to include pre-purchase and post-purchase stages in the relationship and consider how marketers might more effectively measure and manage the entire journey.”

 

3
“Binge Watching and Advertising,” by David Schweidel and Wendy Moe (2016) , Journal of Marketing

“At the risk of a little self-promotion, I would like to highlight this article which empirically examines how the consumption of streaming content is related to advertising effectiveness.  With so much content being consumed through streaming services, much of what we know about advertising through broadcast channels is becoming obsolete. At the same time, the amount of money spent on advertising through streaming services is increasing as that is where more and more consumers can be found.

“This article is one of the first, if not the first, to consider how different kinds of viewers and viewing behaviors are more or less susceptible to advertising. Specifically, this study shows that binge viewers are less susceptible to advertising than those viewers who consume a higher variety of content less frequently. This can have important implications for brands who are investing in advertising on streaming video platforms.”

Related

“Social Media Intelligence” Wins MSI Best Paper and Top Download Awards (2014) [Article]

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