Faculty Publications and Research
Book
Value Above Cost: Driving Superior Financial Performance with CVA, the Most Important Metric You've Never Used
Don Sexton, professor of marketing and director, CIBER
Abstract:
Want more revenue, contribution, and profits? Then start managing, measuring, and optimizing the most crucial driver: Customer Value Added (CVA®). In Value Above Cost, award-winning professor and top consultant Donald E. Sexton demonstrates why CVA® is such a powerful tool for quantifying customer value and the business activities that achieve it. Using CVA®, Sexton demonstrates how to systematically and incontrovertibly link your company's marketing and branding activities to business financial performance—and build a marketing accountability scoreboard that tracks your effectiveness every step of the way. Sexton draws on his experiences working with enterprises of all sizes, from startups to the Fortune 500, sharing powerful insights drawn from disciplines ranging from marketing and economics to finance and beyond. He illustrates these ideas with cases contributed by numerous successful managers. Along the way, he offers a complete blueprint for CVA® maximization: one that will be indispensable to CEOs, CMOs, CFOs, strategists, managers, and entrepreneurs alike.
Learn more about Don Sexton's new book in Ideas At Work.
Research Study
"Cross-Cultural Perceptions and Consequences of Choice"
Sheena Iyengar, professor of management
Overview:
As the different parts of the world become increasingly interconnected, constructs like democracy, capitalism, and consumerism are reaching larger numbers of people than ever before. A key element common to all of these constructs is choice – whether in who to vote for, where to sell one’s labor, or what to buy. This model of choice is so ingrained in Western culture that people often assume it will be uniformly applicable to the rest of the world, an assumption that influences decisions ranging from individuals’ interpersonal interactions to the expansion and marketing of multinational corporations, and even foreign policy. Contrary to this assumption, there is a growing body of research that suggests political, economic, and cultural forces can shape people’s perceptions of and reactions to the provision of choice, in turn significantly affecting their decisions and well-being. The goal of this large-scale survey study is to integrate and build upon prior findings to obtain a comprehensive understanding of cross-cultural attitudes toward choice, and to determine what effects and implications any cultural differences have for consumer behavior, organizational behavior and design, and public policy.
Learn more about Sheena Iyengar's research and her upcoming book, The Art of Choosing, which will be released in March 2010.
