Driving Customer Analytics From the Top
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RESEARCH ARTICLE
Driving Customer Analytics From the Top Frank Germann 1 & Gary L. Lilien 2 & Christine Moorman 3 & Lars Fiedler 4 & Till Groβmaβ 5
# Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Customer analytics has moved to center stage and customer analytics budgets are rising rapidly. It is surprising, then, that many chief marketing officers (CMOs) are uncertain about whether these investments improve firm performance. We address this apparent disconnection using a multi-method approach. Using a large-scale global survey at two points in time, we first show that the use of customer analytics is positively related to firm performance. Second, from among a set of factors identified in the literature, we show that top management team (TMT) advocacy of customer analytics is by far the most important one influencing the degree to which firms use customer analytics. Third, we find that TMT advocacy is also critical for ensuring that customer analytics use results in a positive payoff—an outcome that remains elusive in many firms. Finally, we report on a set of in-depth interviews that offer insight into why TMT advocacy plays such an influential role and identify steps TMTs should take to facilitate the use of customer analytics in their firms. Keywords Customer analytics . Top management team advocacy . Firm performance . Knowledge utilization
1 Introduction Few topics these days get more attention in marketing than customer analytics,1 defined as a “technology-enabled and model-supported approach to harness customer and market
data to enhance marketing decision making” ([44], p. 5). Many firms have made substantial investments in customer analytics over the last decade and those investments are predicted to increase even further [62]. The CMO Survey [75], for example, reports that over the next three years, chief
1 Researchers have used the terms customer analytics and marketing analytics interchangeably. We use customer analytics throughout except when quoting a specific researcher who uses the marketing analytics term. Customer analytics can arise from any source, including digital, social, mobile, retail, sales, and/or other secondary data (see Wedel and Kannan [2016, p. 97] for key domains of customer analytics applications).
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s40547-020-00109-2) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Frank Germann [email protected]
1
University of Notre Dame, 395 Mendoza College of Business, Notre Dame, IN 46556, USA
2
Smeal College of Business, Pennsylvania State University, 468 Business Building, University Park, PA 16802, USA
3
Fuqua School of Business, Duke University, 100 Fuqua Drive, Box 90120, Durham, NC 27708, USA
4
McKinsey & Company, Inc., Am Sandtorkai 77, 20457 Hamburg, Germany
5
McKinsey & Company, Inc., Kennedydamm 24, 40027 Düsseldorf, Germany
Gary L. Lilien [email protected] Christine Moorman [email protected] Lars Fiedler lars_fiedler@mck
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