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Companies spend billions of dollars on direct marketing, targeting individual customers with ever more accuracy. Yet despite the power of the myriad data-collecting and analytical tools at their disposal, they're still having trouble optimizing their direct-marketing investments. Many marketers try to minimize costs by pursuing only those customers who are cheap to find and cheap to keep. Others try to get the most customers they possibly can and keep all of them for as long as they can. But a customer need not be loyal to be highly profitable, and many loyal customers turn out to be highly unprofitable. Companies can get more out of direct marketing if they see it as a single system for generating profits than if they try to maximize performance measures at each stage of the process. This article describes a tool for doing just that. Called ARPRO (Allocating Resources for Profits), the tool is essentially a complex regression analysis that can estimate the impact of a company's direct-marketing investments on the profitability of its customer pool. With data that companies already gather, the tool can show managers how much to spend on acquisition versus retention and even what percentage of their funds they should allocate to the different direct-marketing channels. Using the model, companies can easily see that even small deviations from the optimal levels of customer profitability are expensive. Applying it to one catalog retailer showed, for instance, that a 10% reduction in marketing costs would lead to a 1.8 million dollar drop in long-term customer profits. Conversely, spending 69% less on marketing would actually increase average customer profitability at one B2B service provider by 42%. What's more, the tool can show that finding the optimal balance between investments in acquisition and retention can be more important than finding the optimum amount to invest overall.

In this commentary of "How Support for Black Lives Matter Impacts Consumer Responses on Social Media," we discuss issues related to the research approach, findings, and offer suggestions for future research. In this commentary, we focus on the racial justice movement popularly known as BlackLivesMatter (BLM). We begin our comments by briefly noting the history that led to the formation of the BLM organization and movement. This sets the stage for our comments on "How Support for Black Lives Matter Impacts Consumer Responses on Social Media"—an issue important for marketers who must evolve with an increasingly socially inspired economy. As BLM is a polarizing issue that is often misunderstood, we first note a potential internal validity issue with research on this topic. We then discuss issues specific to Blackout Tuesday, the intervention of interest in the paper. These include the comparability of the treatment and control platforms; the need for a clear baseline during this turbulent period; the possibility that the followers in the control condition were also treated; the parallel trends assumption; and the analysis and interpretation of the authors' headline finding that firms supporting Blackout Tuesday faced a backlash in terms of a reduction in follower growth. Throughout this comment, we offer suggestions for future research that tackles the response to social-political issues like BLM. History: K. Sudir served as the senior editor for this article. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multichannel customer management is the design, deployment, coordination, and evaluation of channels through which firms and customers interact, with the goal of enhancing customer value through effective customer acquisition, retention, and development. The authors identify five major challenges practitioners must address to manage the multichannel environment more effectively: a) data integration, (b) understanding consumer behavior, (c) channel evaluation, (d) allocation of resources across channels, and (e) coordination of channel strategies. The authors also propose a framework that shows the linkages among these challenges and provides a means to conceptualize the field of multichannel customer management. A review of academic research reveals that this field has experienced significant research growth, but the growth has not been distributed evenly across the five major challenges. The authors discuss what has been learned to date and identify emerging generalizations as appropriate. They conclude with a summary of where the research-generated knowledge base stands on several issues pertaining to the five challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]