PRESENTATIONS ON MARKETING SCHEDULED IN VARIOUS TRACKS

Plenary: Monday, 8:00am-9:00am

Game-Changing Analytics: A Disney Perspective
Mark Shafer, BBA, Senior Vice President, Revenue Management, Disney Park and Resorts

We live in a world of constant change and evolution. Yesterday’s strategic advantage can quickly become tomorrow’s industry standard. Your company’s ability to compete on analytics and leverage the unique competitive advantages gained in this area is no exception to this hard cold truth. To stay competitive, companies must continue to invest and evolve at an ever increasing rate. In this plenary talk, Shafer will explore some of the ways one of the most creative companies in the world thinks about analytical-based decision making and how it integrates technology and analytical innovation into delivering world-class experiences to its fans and guests across multiple platforms.

Track 5: Methodology Tutorials - Monday

9:10am-10:00am
Effective Pricing
Warren H. Lieberman, PhD, President, Veritec Solutions

The extent to which a company's pricing decisions lead to profit maximization depends on how well it blends the art and science of pricing. While working to increase the benefits of pricing programs at firms across approximately 20 industries in the past 25 years, Lieberman has developed and characterized strategies and tactics that influence pricing effectiveness. Surprisingly, most lessons retain relevance across industries. Areas Lieberman will discuss include:

• Identifying opportunities to obtain incremental revenues and profits,
• Interdepartmental cooperation,
• Decision support design and implementation,
• Quantitative and credible performance measurement,
• Situational training,
• Product design and revenue management,
• Competitive considerations.
The need to pay attention to the above areas is well recognized, but it's easy to lose sight of their importance as we go about our day-to-day activities. Consequently, Lieberman will provide attendees with a "check list" of activities and questions to review periodically and ensure follow-through.

1:50pm-2:40pm
Marketing in Online Social Spaces
M. Kevin Geraghty, MS, Vice President, Research & Analytics, 360i

Online social spaces such as Facebook and Twitter present operations research professionals with an extraordinary opportunity to cross the great divide between the quantitative direct response world and the traditionally qualitative world of brand marketing. There are three aspects of the social environment that create the opportunity:

• What was hidden is now visible. Conversations about brand preference, customer experience and other aspects of brand health are now regularly posted on blogs.
• What was anecdotal is now accessible to automated capture. Online content may be downloaded and analyzed.
• Analytic tools draw ever-deeper layers of meaning from data. Natural Language Processing and other technologies for handling large amounts of unstructured data are starting to render meaningful insights.
In this talk, Geraghty will outline some of the more exciting analytics supporting DWOM (digital word of mouth) and broad-based social media campaigns at 360i, an award winning digital agency at the forefront of emerging social marketing practice.

Track 6: Forecasting – Monday

1:50pm-2:40pm
Agent-Based Market Analysis and Forecasting
Karl Kempf, PhD, Director of Decision Engineering, Intel Corporation

There are a number of models for the way consumers adopt a new technology, from aggregate market models based on statistics and diffusion equations, to models of an individual based on perceived utility. There is a gap between these models that Kempf’s study tries to bridge using agent-based simulations. The team models the sale of computer chips into the high-end gaming market. Their agents are characterized by the performance of their current gaming platform, a monthly savings stream for financing their hobby, and a threshold for losses before considering a performance upgrade. Making simple and reasonable assumptions on these characteristics Kempf and his team can reproduce the historical sales curves with good accuracy. They propose the use of such agent-based simulations as a useful addition to the toolkit for decision making about future pricing and release timing.

Track 10: Managing Uncertainty & Risk- Tuesday

4:40pm-5:20pm
Marketing Campaign Optimization is Hard (Especially in the Future)
Pramod Singh, PhD, Analytics Solution Architect, Hewlett-Packard Corp.

Optimizing the return on marketing dollars is a near-universal challenge for today’s businesses. Marketers in HP’s Personal Systems Group (PSG) focusing on small and medium businesses (SMB) are squeezed by another double whammy: a small budget and a huge customer base. With over 550,000 customers and more than 20,000,000 prospects, scalability is a primary concern. Past efforts to tackle the issue have struggled due to the difficulty of robustly performing analytics on terabytes of customer data, the problems of large-scale data synchronization of different sources, and the inability to establish a feedback loop that links analytics to performance. In early 2009, PSG marketing implemented an Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) analytics based solution that met these challenges and more. In the 2009 financial year, PSG’s work has been documented as leading to incremental sales revenues of over $100 million. Singh will describe the group’s work via a three-step architecture: customer segmentation (behavioral modeling and cluster analysis), validation, and predictive assignment. Attendee takeaways will include EDW-analytics integration, large dataset clustering and prediction, and segment-based performance tracking.

Track 14: Revenue Management - Tuesday

9:10am-10:00am
Golf Course Revenue Management
Lila Rasekh, PhD, Senior Operations Research Analyst, Revenue Management, Walt Disney World Park and Resorts

Golf course revenue management is a revolutionary step in golf management which has been adapted by many golf course industries in recent years. The goal of the golf course revenue management system is to maximize profits by developing the best reservation policy for each available tee time. This research is based on an analysis of golf course tee-time reservation practice. In this talk, Rasekh will present a unique linear model that can be used to assign the demand to the available tee-times, and thus, maximize their utilization and the total revenue. The linear model uses the forecasted demand data. The model is solved by using the SAS-OR build-in branch and bound (B&B) algorithm. To reduce the computational time, Rasekh and her team propose a heuristic to find an initial feasible solution to the model. This initial solution reduces the CPU time substantially and has enabled the team to solve the larger scale problem by using the SAS-OR.

10:30am-11:20am
Real-World Pricing:  Bridging the Gap from Theory to Practice
Christopher J. Fry, MS, Managing Director, Strategic Management Solutions

While pricing remains one of the most important strategic decisions a company makes, most businesses make little use of the advances in pricing science that have swept the O.R. community over the past few decades. This gap impacts performance and also speaks to the challenge of applying theoretical approaches to complex business problems in uncertain and data-poor environments. In this talk, Fry will discuss how pricing decisions, approaches and priorities vary by business type, market structure, competitor positioning, customer profile and other factors, and will share a selection of case studies illustrating how analytical pricing approaches have been applied in various scenarios despite these challenges. Case examples will include: a process for managing list-price setting; an approach for identifying and quantifying the impact of pricing initiatives in high-transaction-volume businesses; techniques for assessing elasticity response to price changes with limited and noisy information; and metrics and incentives for pricing in a negotiation-based sales environment.

11:30am-12:20pm
Sales Goal Optimization at Con-way Freight
Charles Rosa, PhD, Operations Research Principal, Con-way Freight

Con-way Freight attracts new customers and maintains old ones by using a team of sales professionals. In the past, the sales force has been uniformly incentivized across all customers using broad metrics like total revenue/quarter. This has tended to mean that Con-way’s mix of customers has shifted towards those that ship large quantities on a regular basis; business that does not, in general, maximize the companies’ contribution margin. To correct this situation, Con-way is beginning to partition its customer base into segments that differ from one another by, among other things, the average contribution margin per pound of freight shipped, and the average number of pounds of freight shipped per day. Using these segments, Rosa and his team have developed a revenue management-inspired model to find the geographically specific correct mix of sales goals across the segments that maximizes contribution margin for the company as a whole. Co-authors: Olga Raskina, Sean Devine, Brendt Reif.