Yale Center for Customer Insights Hosts Annual Conference

The Yale Center for Customer Insights will hold its annual Customer Insights Conference on May 13 and 14, bringing together lead academics and practitioners to discuss key issues relating to customer mindset and behavior. Topics will include understanding customer choices, marketplace impact, new product innovations, maximizing brand performance, competitive market strategies, and social media. The keynote address will be given by Arun Sinha, group CMO for Zurich Financial Services, who will discuss the company’s journey to become customer-centric.

Capturing the dynamic state of customer insights, presentations at the conference will detail research on the cutting edge of psychology, neuroscience, organizational design and behavior, and the latest trends in social networking. Some of the contributors will include:

• Tom O’Guinn, professor of marketing, and Erika Paulson, doctoral student, both of the Wisconsin School of Business and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, will detail a paper on how the emergence of social media is leading researchers to focus on the social nature of brands after an overreliance on psychological formulations.
  
  
• Louis Kim, a worldwide product marketing director at Hewlett-Packard, will provide case studies and his own experiences to trace how an idea become an innovation, tracing how the culture of an organization can dramatically alter the original vision.
  
  
• John Copeland, senior expert in consumer and shopper insights at McKinsey & Company, will focus on how companies can ensure the development and delivery of world-class customer insights into an organization.
  
  
• Milica Milosavljevic, postdoctoral researcher in customer neuroscience and the California Institute of Technology, will explain studies on how the brain processes information, and the ramifications they can have on studying consumer behavior.
  
  
• Dina Mayzlin, associate professor at the Yale School of Management, will discuss her research into the manipulation of product reviews by companies, which shows, among other things, that the greater the competition, the greater the chance that reviews are being manipulated.

At the beginning of the conference, Ravi Dhar, George Rogers Clark Professor of Management and Marketing and the director of YCCI, and Dean Sharon Oster will welcome the attendees. Dhar calls the conference a rare chance for scholars and practitioners to interact, share perspectives, and learn from each other’s experiences and discoveries. "Our Customer Insights Conference provides a forum for this kind of idea exchange and an invaluable opportunity for learning on both sides," he says. "We’re excited to have such a great lineup of speakers from academia and industry this year and we’re looking forward to a wonderful conference."