Robert Blattberg

Thomas, Jacqueline S., Robert Blattberg and Edward J. Fox. 2004. Recapturing Lost Customers. Journal of Marketing Research. 41(1): 31-45.

For both academics and practitioners, the dominant focus of customer relationship management has been customer retention. The authors assert that customer winback should also be an important part of a customer relationship management strategy. Customer winback focuses on the reinitiation and management of relationships with customers who have lapsed or defected from a firm. In some cases, firms engage in extensive efforts to reacquire lapsed customers or defectors, and a common tactic is lowering the price to reacquire a customer. This investigation goes beyond the reacquisition pricing strategy and also examines the optimal pricing strategy when the customer has decided to reinitiate the relationship. By simultaneously modeling reacquisition and duration of the second tenure with the firm, the authors determine that the optimal pricing strategy for their application involves a low reacquisition price and higher prices when customers have been reacquired. In addition to pricing strategy, they also discuss the implications of their findings for targeting lapsed customers for reacquisition.

Blattberg, Robert. 1981. A Micro-Modeling Approach to Determine the Advertising-Sales Relationship. Management Science. 27(9): 988-1005.

The purpose of this paper is to derive a model of advertising effects on the firm's sales. A micromodel is postulated and aggregated across individuals and over time to produce a macromodel of the aggregate sales-advertising relationship for a single product. The micromodel postulated is very simple. It incorporates two factors: reach of the ads and rate of decay of their effectiveness over time. This approach to modeling advertising effects is shown to be fruitful in several respects: (1) the coefficients of the aggregate equation are easily interpretable -- in terms of the reach and decay parameters; (2) the model derived is nonlinear yet estimable; (3) a special case of the model is very similar to lag models that have been in use; (4) the model can be used whatever the unit of time is; (5) the carryover effect of advertising (as commonly defined) is not constant, but depends upon the previous spending levels; and (6) the model helps illustrate that the duration of advertising may be greatly overstated if aggregate lagged dependent variable models are simplistically interpreted.