| Abstract: |
Brands are increasingly leveraging communities to engage customers. A brand interacts with a group of customers by posting valuable content, responding to customer questions, and letting customers chat with each other in a community. It converts platform-owned public traffic on e-commerce aggregators to brand-owned private traffic for better customer management. For this reason, it is also called private domains. It is widely believed to be effective in increasing customer loyalty and reducing churn among practitioners. However, estimating the causal effect of joining a brand community on sales is challenging given that customers are self-selecting into these communities. In this paper, we present results from a large-scale three-wave field experiment that randomly solicits about 60K existing customers of a brand to join its community on WeChat in May and June 2022. We investigate four main questions. First, does joining the community increase sales volume and value? And if so, for what type of products? Second, is the effect bigger on certain types of customers? Third, as customers can also purchase the products in the community, does it cannibalize sales on other channels? Fourth, how does the effect change over time? We also discuss ways to make brand communities more effective.
|
|
Biography:
|
Jeremy Yang is an Assistant Professor of Business Administration in the Marketing Unit at Harvard Business School. He teaches Marketing in the MBA required curriculum. He develops data products for advertising, targeting, and pricing decisions in his research. These algorithms are typically guided by some basic economic or behavioral principles and implemented with techniques in machine learning and causal inference. He is also broadly interested in the creator economy.
He received his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is also affiliated with the Harvard Digital, Data, and Design (D^3) Institute, the Data Science Initiative, the Institute for Quantitative Social Science, and the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy. His work has received several recognitions including an INFORMS Annual Meeting Best Paper Award, American Statistical Association Dissertation Proposal Award, and MSI Alden G. Clayton Dissertation Proposal Award.
|
