Wharton Challenge: Relationship Marketing at StubHub

Webcast: March 25, 3-4 Eastern / 12-1 Pacific Register Here

The Wharton Customer Analytics Initiative (formerly WIMI) announces the next WCAI Research Opportunity which will be sponsored by StubHub (www.stubhub.com). StubHub, the leading destination for fans seeking tickets to live events, seeks to go beyond computing conversion rates for individual email campaigns to exploring the longer-term effects of their relationship marketing activities on customers' future transactions. They will provide complete histories of e-mails, targeted promotional offers and transactions for a sample of their customers. During the observation window, StubHub launched a new relationship marketing program that included more aggressive targeted promotions with randomly selected holdout groups. StubHub is interested in understanding how these promotions affect customer behavior, whether some of the older customers who haven't purchased lately can be revived by these campaigns and whether there is a longer-term downside to "communicating too much" with their customers.

Information on targeted promotions will include a detailed description of the discount or promotion offered as well as the criteria used to select customers to receive the offer. Customer transaction histories will include detailed information about what type of tickets were purchased as well as customer's self-reported preferences for locations, teams and artists. In addition to e-mail offers and transactions, the data will include records of "near purchases", events where the customer has selected a lot of tickets to purchase but fails to complete the transaction.

To learn more about the data and business context, interested faculty and doctoral students can attend a webinar on March 25 from 3-4 Eastern/12-1 Pacific. Webinar registration is available now by clicking here.

More details of the data will be described and executives from StubHub will be available for a live Q&A. The webinar will also be archived for those who can't attend live. After the webinar, interested researchers can submit proposals to Elea Feit, Research Director, WCAI, efeit@wharton.upenn.edu by April 15.

Eric T. Bradlow
The K.P. Chao Professor
Professor of Marketing, Statistics, and Education
Co-Director, Wharton Customer Analytics Initiative
Vice-Dean, Wharton Doctoral Programs
Statistics, and Education; Co-Director, Wharton Interactive Media Initiative; Vice-Dean, Wharton Doctoral Programs

Peter S. Fader
Frances and Pei-Yuan Chia Professor
Professor of Marketing
Co-Director, Wharton Customer Analytics Initiative