David A. Schweidel

• Professor at Emory University

Publishers are increasingly turning to user-generated content (UGC) to supplement the content they produce. However, what is the relationship between the consumption of UGC and that of publisher-generated content (PGC)? Consumption of different types of UGC may have different effects, one creating a positive synergy with PGC consumption that nets m...

Social media offers brands the ability to gauge consumer reactions to marketing and brand crises. While social media listening has focused on aggregate patterns, consumers differ in how they react to a crisis faced by a particular brand. Analyzing consumer behavior for 39 brands pertaining to 77 brand crises through the lens of consumer posts on br...

From advertisers and marketers to salespeople and leaders, everyone wants to hold attention. They want to make ads, pitches, presentations, and content that captivates audiences and keeps them engaged. But not all content has that effect. What makes some content more engaging? A multi-method investigation combines controlled experiments with natura...

This research investigates how paywall suspensions affect subsequent subscription decisions and how the patterns of content consumption moderate such effects.

Blockchain technology is having an increasingly profound impact on the business landscape. Blockchain--a means for storing information and transactions in secure, decentralized manner—has many potential applications for marketing. However, marketing research and practice are still tentative about the use of blockchain and are yet to fully understan...

We explore the relationship between the content of political advertising on television and ad effectiveness. Specifically, we investigate how slant – the extremeness of the message – and consistency with the candidate’s primary campaign messaging in national ad buys relate to two measures of voter behavior: online word-of-mouth (WOM) and voter pref...

Supporting Content Marketing with Natural Language Generation

Marketers are adopting increasingly sophisticated ways to engage with customers throughout their journeys. We extend prior perspectives on the customer journey by introducing the role of digital signals that consumers emit throughout their activities. We argue that the ability to detect and act on consumer digital signals is a source of competitive...

Marketing is the functional area primarily responsible for driving the organic growth of a firm. In the age of digital marketing and big data, marketers are inundated with increasingly rich data from an ever-expanding array of sources. Such data may help marketers generate insights about customers and competitors. One fundamental question remains:...

We develop a topic model with multiple latent changepoints and demonstrate an approach to detect changes in the topics mentioned in brand-related social media posts.

Despite the growth of research on political marketing, fundamental questions concerning brand value of political candidates and its relationship with marketing mix activities remain unanswered. This research extends premium-based brand valuation methods to the political context by presenting a performance premium approach to assessing the strength...

Words are part of almost every marketplace interaction. Online reviews, customer service calls, press releases, marketing communications, and other interactions create a wealth of textual data. But how can marketers best use such data? This article provides an overview of automated textual analysis and details how it can be used to generate marketi...

We investigate the relationship between product placement in television programs and the volume of social media activity and website traffic for the featured brand.

Television viewers are increasingly engaging in media-multitasking while watching programming. One prevalent multiscreen activity is the simultaneous consumption of television alongside social media chatter about the programming, an activity referred to as “social TV.” Although online interactions with programming can result in a more engaged and c...

Political advertising is controversial, as there is widespread concern about money from political action committees (PACs and super PACs) distorting the democratic process. Studying advertising effectiveness is, however, a challenging topic for several reasons, including the endogenous nature of fundraising and ad spending rates. However, the exten...

While mobile promotions have become increasingly popular in recent years, limited research has examined the effects of mobile promotions over time. This research investigates the effects of two popular types of promotional offers, price discount and non-price free sample coupons, on purchase behavior. To this end, we present a dynamic model of cust...

One of the most significant developments in the domain of marketing in recent years involves the proliferation of user-generated content, particularly online social media. Social media has created a power shift in the relationship between consumers and brands, providing consumers more power by allowing them to easily broadcast their views and op...

While the data from social media platforms are abundant, social media has primarily been viewed as a channel through which marketers can reach consumers. While its use as a promotional channel is important, this perspective ignores the potential value of social media data. From social media data, much can be learned about individual consumers and m...

Social media platforms are changing how people spread information via word of mouth by allowing individuals to rapidly disseminate information to virtually anyone. Yet little is known about whether this ability affects how contagion spreads within online social systems. While digital platforms may facilitate diffusion to those nearby, they also may...

Social TV is the simultaneous consumption of television alongside social media chatter about the programming. This topic is highly relevant for marketers. Usually it is considered as a bad thing for TV advertisers. While there can be distraction from the ads, marketers can also benefit from positive effects. Consumers’ multiscreen activities can be...

In this research, we investigate the relationship between television advertising and online word-of-mouth (WOM) by examining the joint consumption of television programming and production of social media by television viewers, termed social TV. We explore how television advertising impacts the volume of online WOM about advertised brands and about...

We develop a model that examines the role of content, content-user fit, and influence on social media rebroadcasting behavior. While previous research has studied the role of content or the role of influence in the spread of social media content separately, none has simultaneously examined both in an effort to assess the relative effects of each. O...

How users consume media has shifted dramatically as viewers migrate from traditional broadcast channels toward online channels. Rather than following the schedule dictated by television networks and consuming one episode of a series each week, many viewers now engage in binge watching, which involves consuming several episodes of the same series in...

Dynamic customer targeting is a common task for marketers actively managing customer relationships. Such efforts can be guided by insight into the return on investment from marketing interventions, which can be derived as the increase in the present value of a customer’s expected future transactions. Using the popular latent attrition framework, on...

Customer base analysis is an essential tool to measure and develop relationships with customers. While various models have been proposed in a noncontractual setting, they focus primarily on analyzing transactional patterns associated with a single product category or a firm-level activity, such as the times at which purchases are made at a particul...

Recent years have seen a considerable rise in the use of product placement in television shows. Taking advantage of second-by-second product placement, advertising, and audience tuning data, this research explores the impact of such product placement on the extent to which viewers tune away from downstream advertisements. Motivated by the behaviora...

As arts organizations frequently seek purchases and donations from the same consumers, one of their challenges is identifying which consumers are likely to become donors in the future. With all of the data currently available, many organizations are looking to their databases to predict future consumer behavior. In the customer relationship managem...

In this research, the authors jointly model the sentiment expressed in social media posts and the venue format to which it was posted as two interrelated processes in an effort to provide a measure of underlying brand sentiment. Using social media data from firms in two distinct industries, they allow the content of the post and the underlying sent...

Customer base analysis is a key element in customer valuation and can provide guidance for decisions such as resource allocation. Yet extant models often focus on a single activity, such as purchases from a retailer or donations to a nonprofit organization. These models do not consider other ways that an individual may engage with an organization,...

In the world of Facebook, Twitter and Yelp, water-cooler conversations with co-workers and backyard small talk with neighbors have moved from the physical world to the digital arena. In this new landscape, organizations ranging from Fortune 500 companies to government agencies to political campaigns continuously monitor online opinions in an effort...

Online consumer reviews are a convenient, valuable pool of information for potential buyers as well as for marketers. But how reliable is this information? A closer look at the motives behind posted product reviews shows that online opinions should indeed be interpreted with care. The study results reveal that the composition of the customer base c...

When defection is unobserved, latent attrition models provide useful insights about customer behavior and accurate forecasts of customer value. Yet extant models ignore direct marketing efforts. Response models incorporate the effects of direct marketing, but because they ignore latent attrition, they may lead firms to waste resources on inactive c...

Customer base analysis is a key element in customer valuation and can provide guidance for decisions such as resource allocation. Yet, extant models often focus on a single activity, such as purchases from a retailer or donations to a non-profit organization. These models do not consider other ways that an individual may engage with an organization...

While shopping basket composition and inter-purchase spells have been investigated in the marketing literature, limited research has jointly considered these aspects of repeat purchase behavior in transactional settings. This research proposes a model that predicts customers' purchase patterns in a multi-category transactional setting, where intera...

We investigate the drivers of social media rebroadcasting behavior by jointly examining the effects of message content, user heterogeneity (both observed and unobserved), the fit between message content and individual users, and the influence of prior rebroadcasting activity. We focus on the Twitter postings from the top 10 business schools as iden...

We develop a “buy ’til you die” latent attrition model that incorporates transaction-specific co-variates. We then apply this model to investigate the role of service quality on customer attrition in non-contractual settings. Our modeling approach is easy to implement, does not require simulation-based estimation methods, and is flexible enough to...

In this research, we jointly model the venue choice decision and the sentiment expressed in social media posts, recognizing that the two processes may be inter-related. Using social media data from firms in two distinct industries, we allow for both the content of the post and the underlying sentiment toward the brand to affect both processes. Our...

Great sums of marketing dollars are spent on television advertising time in the absence of precise audience-size information for individual advertising units. This paper uses granular data from a large system of set-top boxes to observe how television audiences decline and rebuild during expensive commercial time. The data reveal greater set delive...

Latent attrition models serve as the foundation for customer base analyses in transactional settings. Despite their intuitive appeal, limited research has been conducted to generalize these “buy till you die” models to multivariate contexts to examine the nature of attrition when a firm offers multiple types of transactional activities. Attrition f...

Our research investigates the impact of user-generated content (UGC) on product innovation. Prior research has focused on the role of UGC as a form of consumer-to-consumer communication that enhances product promotion. Our research focuses on the role of UGC as a form of consumer-to-developer communication that facilitates product innovation. Speci...

Multiservice providers, such as telecommunication and financial service companies, can benefit from understanding how customers' service portfolios evolve over the course of their relationships. This can provide guidance for managerial issues such as customer valuation and predicting customers' future behavior, whether it is acquiring additional se...

Whereas recent research has demonstrated the impact of online product ratings and reviews on product sales, we still have a limited understanding of the individual's decision to contribute these opinions. In this research, we empirically model the individual's decision to provide a product rating and investigate factors that influence this decision...

Customer retention and customer churn are key metrics of interest to marketers, but little attention has been placed on linking the different reasons for which customers churn to their value to a contractual service provider. In this article, we put forth a hierarchical competing risk model to jointly model when customers choose to terminate their...

Audience measures serve as the basis on which billions of dollars of television advertising are purchased each year. However, these measures often fall short of providing marketers and media planners with information about the size of the audience that has the opportunity to see advertisements during commercial breaks. Although program audience mea...

Audience measures serve as the basis on which billions of dollars of television advertising are purchased each year. However, these measures often fall short of providing marketers and media planners with information about the size of the audience that has the opportunity to see advertisements during commercial breaks. Although program audience mea...

The use of product placement has grown rapidly in recent years. While technology has made it easier for viewers to avoid watching traditional television commercials, embedding products within entertainment offers a means by which marketers can reach their audiences. Though research has examined the executional factors that make product placement mo...

This paper posits a new framework to model the trial of and repeat purchasing of a new product. While much research has examined underlying shifts in consumer purchasing patterns, the typical assumption has been that the underlying purchasing process remains the same although the purchasing rate may change over time. Motivated by Fader, Hardie, and...

Understanding how customers' service portfolios evolve over the course of their relationship can provide multi-service firms, such as telecommunication and financial service providers, with useful guidance for managerial issues such as customer valuation and targeting. Complicating matters, however, is the fact that ownership of individual services...

With advertising purchased based on estimates of the audience size, it is important for both researchers and media planners to understand how tuning behavior varies across set top boxes, channels, and dayparts. These questions are at the core of a call for increased accountability in television advertising. As television advertisements must be view...

Two widely recognized components, central to the calculation of customer value, are acquisition and retention propensities. However, while extant research has incorporated such components into different types of models, limited work has investigated the kinds of associations that may exist between them. In this research, we focus on the relationshi...

Service churn and retention rates remain central as constructs in marketing activities, such as valuation of service subscribers and resource allocation. Although extant approaches have been proposed to relate service churn to external factors, such as reported satisfaction, marketing-mix activities, and so on, managers often face situations in whi...

This paper posits a new framework to model the trial of and repeat purchasing of a new product. While much research has examined underlying shifts in consumer purchasing patterns, the typical assumption has been that the underlying purchasing process remains the same although the purchasing rates may change over time. Motivated by Fader, Hardie, an...

Service churn and retention rates remain central as constructs in marketing activities, such as valuation of service subscribers and resource allocation. Although extant approaches have been proposed to relate service churn to external factors, such as reported satisfaction, marketing-mix activities, and so on, managers often face situations in whi...

This research presents a feature-based statistical model and subsequently explores the degree to which similarity perceptions between two advertisements can be decomposed and explained by a “weighted-andsummed” distance measure, computed on the advertisements’ executional elements, after controlling for familiarity and viewers’ attitudinal response...

Though customer relationship management (CRM) has become a top priority in both practice and research, limited work has addressed CRM as it applies to contractual exchanges, such as those between customers of a cable service provider that offers different service packages. In this dissertation, I make two distinctions to segment the extant research...

The ability of managers to utilize sales-history data to form accurate inferences about the long-term value of customers is examined. Although in recent years considerable advances have been made in the development of formal models that allow such assessments to be, statistically, in most real-world settings the identification of key customers rema...