Welcome to my web site.
I am an Associate Professor at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science, University of South Australia.
The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute sits with the School of Marketing at UniSA.
The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute exists to develop Empirical Generalisations in marketing and widely disseminate them.
The link to the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute is:
http://www.marketingscience.info/
My major research interests are:
Pricing - the effects of price and price changes on buyers
Competitive Market Structure - how brands gain and lose customers among each other.
See below for a praecis of my current research projects.
Major Findings
These are some of the findings I have made.
Scale points in surveys: it matters little whether questions ask for responses on 5-point, 7-point or 10-point scales. Once the answers are re-scaled using a simple method, the results are all quite comparable.
Long-term customers are less price sensitive: customers who have been with a service provider for a long time are less likely to switch away when prices are raised, compared to newer customers.
Price increases have about twice the effect on brand loyalty than price decreases: confirming Tversky & Kahneman's findings in a services context. Price rises raised the defection rates of customers, while price decreases did little to lower the defection rate, in a large study of insurance renewals.
About 20% of the sales increase to a promoted brand variant comes from other pack sizes of the same brand. This is a paper under review at present. The study covers 10 categories in three countries. This study will be published in the Journal of Retailing in 2012.
Brands share customers in-line with their size: taking Ehrenberg & Goodhardt's findings to new contexts. Such as: tourist destinations share tourists moreso with other 'big' destinations and less so with other 'small' destinations - with some proximity or geographic partitions. Beer buyers cross-purchase beer brands about in-line with the market share of the brands. Even sportswear brands including "lovemark" Nike - their buyers cross-purchase competing brands in-line with brand share.
I also teach the following courses:
Marketing Principles, Trading and Exchange. This is the introductory marketing course for undergraduate students.
Brand Management. This is a course for second or third year students. It covers broadly the topics of product / brand management and pricing.
Current Research Projects
WHO BUYS PRICE PROMOTIONS
This project aims to identify if certain demographic classes are especially likely to buy consumer goods when on temporary promotion. This was the topic of an Honors thesis by Mr. Alex Gibbons, awaiting write-up for journal submission.
PRICE PROMOTIONS and CANNIBALIZATION
To what extent do temporary price promotions for one brand steal sales from the others in the owner's portfolio ?
HAS BRAND LOYALTY DECLINED
This study aims to replicate and extend the study by Dekimpe and colleagues in 1997. My co-investigators on this project are Lars Meyer-Waarden and Carl Driesener. It will use longitudinal consumer panel data kindly provided by TNS (UK).
EROSION of REPEAT-PURCHASE LOYALTY.
This is a study with Charles Graham and John Scriven (LSBU). It is a replication of East & Hammond who found a decline in the repeat rate of consumers as the time period from the intial purchase lengthened. That is, the proportion of Q1 buyers who also buy in Q2 is say, 50% but the repeat rate from Q1 to Q3 is 48%, Q1 to Q4 is 47% and so on.
VARIATION IN LOYALTY TO PRIVATE LABEL BRANDS
This study is analyzing the factors associated with some PL brands having higher loyalty than expected, while others have lower loyalty than expected. Some promising findings have emerged, such as price level. The study is under review at present.