Sara Valentini

Sara Valentini is Associate Professor of Marketing at Bocconi University. She earned a Ph.D. in Management and a B.S. in Statistics, cum laude, from the University of Bologna (Italy). Professor Valentini was visiting scholar at the Tuck School of Business, Dartmouth College (USA). Prior to joining Bocconi, she was an Associate Professor in the marketing department at the University of Bologna and Associate Dean for Alumni at Bologna Business School.

She co-chairs the track Methods, Modelling & Marketing Analytics for the EMAC conference. She also served as elected Italian Representative of the Executive Board - European Marketing Academy (EMAC).

Research Areas

Her area of expertise is in the measurement and analysis of marketing effectiveness and customer profitability, especially in the fields of multichannel marketing and customer relationship management. The common thread running through her works is the evaluation of the impact of marketing actions along different stages of the customer journey.

She also has a longstanding interest in complaint-handing and service recovery in terms of actions (e.g., incentives, procedures) that firms take in response to a service failure. Her most recent research interests focus on evaluating the impact of different marketing strategies on product-returns dynamics, customer-data acquisition, and the generating of earned media.

Sara’s research has appeared in Journal of Marketing, Marketing Science, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Journal of Retailing, Marketing Letters, and in other outlets such as MIT press.

Selected Publications

• Valentini, Sara, Scott A. Neslin, and Elisa Montaguti. "Identifying omnichannel deal prone segments, their antecedents, and their consequences." Journal of Retailing (2020) 96(3), 310-327.
• Valentini, Sara, Chiara Orsingher, and Alexandra Polyakova. "Customers’ emotions in service failure and recovery: a meta-analysis." Marketing Letters (2020): 31, 199–216.
• Montaguti, Elisa, Scott A. Neslin and Sara Valentini (2016), “Can marketing campaigns induce multichannel buying and more profitable customers? A field experiment”, Marketing Science Volume 35, Issue 2, March-April 2016, Pages 201-217.
• Valentini, Sara, Montaguti, Elisa and Scott A. Neslin (2011), “Decision Process Evolution in Customer Channel Choice”, Journal of Marketing, 75 (November), 72–86, 2011.
• Orsingher, Chiara, Marzocchi, Gian Luca and Sara Valentini (2011), “Consumer (goal) satisfaction: A means-ends chain approach”, Psychology & Marketing, 28(7), 730-748, 2011.
• Orsingher, Chiara, Valentini, Sara and Matteo De Angelis (2010), “A Meta-analysis of Satisfaction with Complaint Handling in Services”, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 38 (2), 169-186, 2010.
• Valentini, Sara and Elisa Montaguti (2017), “Brand e Social Media: Alla Ricerca degli Strumenti più Efficaci Nella Caccia All’Engagement”, Harvard Business Review Italia, Settembre 2017, 102-109
• Valentini, Sara, Montaguti, Elisa and Scott A. Neslin (2015), “Decision Process Evolution in Customer Channel Choice” in “From Little’s Law to Marketing Science: Essays in Honor of John D.C. Little”, eds. Glen Urban and John Hauser MIT Press.