Sixth Invitational Choice Symposium
Sponsored by University of Colorado, Boulder
Estes Park, Colorado
June 4-8, 2004
Randy Bucklin (UCLA), Benedict Dellaert (Universiteit Maastricht), Xavier Drèze (Univ of Penn), Gerald Häubl (Univ of Alberta), Sandy Jap (Emory), John Little (MIT), Tom Meyvis (NYU), Alan Montgomery (Carnegie Mellon Univ), Arvind Rangaswamy (Penn State), Joel Steckel (NYU), and Russ Winer (NYU)
Throughout its history, marketing has embraced the notion of "interactivity": it has sought to manage conversational relationships with customers for as long as there have been sales forces and postal services. Marketers have long espoused the rhetoric of interactivity, of listening to and responding to the voice of the customer. Nevertheless, the dominant model in marketing since its inception as a formal business discipline has been mass broadcast, not interactive. The reach of broadcast-associated methods has been so wide, the cost per contact so low, and the control of content so precise that interactive methods have been applied only in situations where customers have very high value, such as some industrial marketing contexts.
All of this is changing: during the 1990s, technological advances
on a number of fronts (most notably low cost digital data storage,
high speed data analysis, and inexpensive network-based interactive
communications) suggest that the cost disadvantage of interactive
methods relative to broadcast methods is lessening. In the early
21st century, firms are thinking seriously and practically about
an interactive marketing paradigm-one that integrates mass scale
with individual responsiveness. The rapid growth of the Internet
as a medium for communications, as a channel of distribution,
and as a way of reaching individual customers efficiently and
effectively has not only affected marketing managers decision-making
but has created the need for new directions in marketing thought.
"Choice in Interactive Environments"
Saturday, June 5
Sunday, June 6
Monday, June 7
Tuesday, June 8