The main objective of customer satisfaction programs is to increase customer retention rates. In explaining the link between customer satisfaction and loyalty, switching costs play an important role and provide useful insight. For example, the presence of switching costs can mean that some seemingly loyal customers are actually dissatisfied but do not defect because of high switching costs. Thus, the level of switching costs moderates the link between satisfaction and loyalty. The purposes of this paper are: to examine the moderating role of switching costs in the customer satisfaction‐loyalty link; and to identify customer segments and then analyze the heterogeneity in the satisfaction‐loyalty link among the different segments. An empirical example based on the mobile phone service market in France indicates support for the moderating role of switching costs. Managerial implications of the results are discussed.

Assessment of accurate market size and early adoption patterns is essential to strategic decision making of managers involved in new-product launches. This article proposes methodology that explains changes in parameter estimates of the Bass model, (coefficient of innovation), (coefficient of imitation), and (market penetration rate) by direction of "extra-Bass" skew in the data, or equivalently, by underlying heterogeneity of the population. This research shows significantly opposite patterns of these parameter estimates, depending on skew of the diffusion curve detected by a generalized model, i.e., the gamma/shifted Gompertz (G/SG) model, which embeds the Bass model as a special case. The G/SG model originally presented in Bemmaor (1994) is based on two assumptions: (1) Individual-level times to first purchase are distributed shifted Gompertz and (2) individual-level propensity to buy follows a gamma distribution across the population. We assume that the scale parameter of the shifted Gompertz distribution is constant across consumers. The advantage the G/SG model has over alternative diffusion models such as the nonuniform influence model is that its cumulative distribution function takes a closed-form expression. In line with Van den Bulte and Lilien (1997), we analyze these opposite patterns from simulated data using the G/SG model as the true model and 12 real adoption data sets. The patterns are: (1) as the level of censoring decreases, the estimates of and decrease and those of increase when data exhibit more right skew than the Bass model and (2) the estimates of and increase and those of q decrease when data exhibit more left skew than the Bass model. For the simulated data, we manipulated four dimensions: (1) "extra-Bass" skew in the data, (2) ratio , (3) speed of diffusion, and (4) error variance. Both results of the simulated data and the real adoption data sets confirm the existence of two opposite patterns of parameter estimates of the Bass model depending on "extra-Bass" skew. When the model is correctly specified with simulated data, estimates of increase and those of decrease for both the Bass and the G/SG models. The estimates of increase as one adds data points only for the G/SG model. No significant tendency in parameter estimates of was detected for the Bass model. As for ill-conditioning issues, systematic changes in the parameter estimates of the G/SG model can be substantially larger in some cases than those obtained with the Bass model, even though the data were generated by taking the G/SG model as the true one. Therefore, model complexity can aggravate the tendency for parameters to change systematically as one adds data points. The forecasting results from the simulated data show the supremacy of the G/SG model. It provides more accurate results than the Bass model in the one-step ahead, two-step ahead, and three-step ahead forecasts. With the real data set, the G/SG model provides more accurate one-step ahead forecasts than the Bass model, but the model's forecasting performance det...

The benefi t of managing customer relationship by inputs (acquisition and retention costs) and outputs (revenues) for each customer is that marketing managers can better prioritise their efforts by examining the return on marketing investment and thus better differentiate customers by their relative benefi ts and costs. Valuing customers and measuring marketing effect using only direct fi nancial contributions, however, carries a potential risk of misleading marketing managers since much of the relationship-based indicators are latent such as word of mouth (WOM) but still contribute substantially to customer lifetime value (CLV). In this paper, based on the company data and simulation, we empirically investigate the effect of WOM in estimating CLV. Managerial implications and future research directions are discussed.

International audienceIn this study we develop a method that optimally selects online media vehicles and determines the number of advertising impressions that should be purchased and then served from each chosen website. As a starting point, we apply Danaher's [Danaher, P. J. 2007. Modeling page views across multiple websites with an application to Internet reach and frequency prediction. Marketing Sci. 26(3) 422-437] multivariate negative binomial distribution (MNBD) for predicting online media exposure distributions. The MNBD is used as a component in the broader task of media selection. Rather than simply adapting previous selection methods used in traditional media, we show that the Internet poses some unique challenges. Specifically, online banner ads and other forms of online advertising are sold by methods that differ substantially from the way other media advertising is sold. We use a nonlinear optimization algorithm to solve the optimization problem and derive the optimum online media schedule. Data from an online audience measurement firm and an advertising agency are used to illustrate the speed and accuracy of our method, which is substantially quicker than using complete enumeration

Abstract. We developed multimodal multiphoton microspectroscopy using a small-diameter probe with gradient-index lenses and applied it to unstained Alzheimer's disease (AD) brain samples. Our system maintained the image quality and spatial resolution of images obtained using an objective lens of similar numerical aperture. Multicolor images of AD brain samples were obtained simultaneously by integrating two-photon excited fluorescence and second-harmonic generation on a coherent anti-Stokes Raman scattering (CARS) microendoscope platform. Measurements of two hippocampal regions, the cornus ammonis-1 and dentate gyrus, revealed more lipids, amyloid fibers, and collagen in the AD samples than in the normal samples. Normal and AD brains were clearly distinguished by a large spectral difference and quantitative analysis of the CH mode using CARS microendoscope spectroscopy. We expect this system to be an important diagnosis tool in AD research. © The Authors.Published by SPIE under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. Distribution or reproduction of this work in whole or in part requires full attribution of the original publication, including its DOI.