Knowing What to Sell, When, and to Whom

by V. Kumar, Rajkumar Venkatesan and Werner J. Reinartz

From the Magazine (March 2006)

Summary.

You are a chief marketing officer contemplating your company’s quarterly mail-shot to customers. You know that if you can get some of your customers to buy from you, then you’ll have increased the chances that they’ll come back again in the future; second-time customers are more likely to become third-time customers than first-time customers are to become second-time ones, and so on. But the mailing is an expensive proposition, and you know that in the past only about 3% of customers have actually responded to mailings by making a purchase. Shareholders and financial analysts are keeping a close eye on your company’s marketing ROI, so you need to make each contact with your customers count.

A version of this article appeared in the March 2006 issue of Harvard Business Review.

V. Kumar is a Regents’ Professor, the Richard and Susan Lenny Distinguished Chair, a professor of marketing, and the executive director of the Center for Excellence in Brand and Customer Management at Georgia State University’s J. Mack Robinson College of Business.

Rajkumar Venkatesan is the Bank of America Research Professor of Business Administration at the University of Virgina’s Darden Graduate School of Business in Charlottesville, VA. He is a co-author of Cutting Edge Marketing Analytics (FT Press) and offers a course through Coursera on Marketing Analytics

Werner J. Reinartz , director of the Center for Research in Retailing (IFH) and professor of marketing at the University of Cologne, researches firms’ customer strategies and is a coauthor of Customer Relationship Management: Concept, Strategy, and Tools (Springer Books, 2018).

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Knowing What to Sell, When, and to Whom

Summary.

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