Wednesday, October 16, 2024
Greta O'Brien
Wharton alumni Club members are admitted to the event free of charge, and non-members will be charged $20. Become a Wharton Club of Colorado member today. We'll offer attendees a free drink and light appetizers will be served.
Quantifying the Qualitative: New Frontiers in Customer Valuation and HR Performance Assessment/Calibration
Professor Peter Fader, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania
Prof. Fader will share highlights of his recent research (and commercialization efforts) for two important topics that demand more rigorous approaches than what we see in current practice: (1) predicting customer lifetime value and (2) human resources management. Much of his career has focused on the first topic — developing forward-looking models of customer value, motivating firms to use them, and developing an ever-increasing (and increasingly impactful) set of applications to demonstrate their value in a transparent, accountable manner.
More recently he has been bringing similar perspectives (and rigor) to HR assessment and its associated use cases (e.g., learning/development, financial compensation, and desires to optimize organizational efficiency/effectiveness). In this session he’ll cover the challenges to be overcome across these two settings (some that are shared, some idiosyncratic), an overview of the methods involved, some case studies of companies making progress on one or both dimensions, and some longer-term aspirations to bring these two approaches together.
About Peter Fader
Peter Fader is the Frances and Pei-Yuan Chia Professor of Marketing at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. His expertise centers around the analysis of behavioral data to understand and forecast customer shopping/purchasing activities. He works with firms from a wide range of industries, such as telecommunications, financial services, gaming/entertainment, retailing, and pharmaceuticals. Managerial applications focus on topics such as customer relationship management, lifetime value of the customer, and sales forecasting for new products. Much of his research highlights the consistent (but often surprising) behavioral patterns that exist across these industries and other seemingly different domains.
In addition to his various roles and responsibilities at Wharton, Professor Fader co-founded a predictive analytics firm (Zodiac) in 2015, which was sold to Nike in 2018. He then co-founded (and continues to run) Theta to commercialize his more recent work on “customer-based corporate valuation.”
Beyond his focus on customer-oriented activities, Professor Fader has expanded his interests in “quantifying the qualitative” to include employee assessment/management as well. He recently co-founded Incompass Labs to popularize an innovative “incentive-compatible peer assessment system” to bring the same kind of rigor and accountability to human resources that he has brought to marketing for many years.
Fader is the author of three books: “Customer Centricity: Focus on the Right Customers for Strategic Advantage” (2020), “The Customer Centricity Playbook” with Sarah Toms (2018), and “The Customer-Base Audit” with Bruce Hardie and Michael Ross (2022).
He has won many awards for his research and teaching accomplishments. Among these achievements, he was named by Advertising Age as one of its inaugural “25 Marketing Technology Trailblazers” in 2017 (and was the only academic on the list).
