The Smith School has launched an initiative to digitally
distribute business management-focused feature articles and
interviews to promote the school’s thought leadership. Under
the “Business Intelligence On-Demand” umbrella, the school
now publishes a quarterly e-newsletter, provides an
RSS
feed, and delivers weekly
podcasts, which enable subscribers
to download five-minute video and audio clips to their iPods
or other MP3 players. The video and audio podcasts feature
interviews with Smith faculty, as well as audio versions of
business management articles from
Smith Business
magazine and the school’s research newsletter,
Research@Smith.
 A
recent study from the Pew Internet & American Life Project
finds that more than 22 million American adults, or 11% of
adults, own iPods or MP3 players. Of those, 29% have
downloaded podcasts. By 2010 the number of podcast users is
expected to reach 56 million, according to a study by the
Diffusion Group.
“Smith podcasts deliver management insight from Smith’s
world-class faculty and other members of the Smith
community, so the service is a great way for managers to
stay on top of best business practices,” said Jeff Heebner,
Smith’s managing director for marketing communications. “And
because subscribers can download the content directly to
their mobile devices, they can watch or listen to it
whenever and wherever they want.”
The same audio and video clips can be
accessed via the
Web for those who don’t subscribe to the podcasts.
Subscribers to Smith’s new RSS, or “really simple
syndication,” feed get news articles, opinion pieces, event
information, and other Smith School content delivered
directly to their desktop computers via an RSS reader from
Google, Yahoo or another service.
The new quarterly e-newsletter, “Leading the Digital
Economy,” gives subscribers access to print articles, as
well as video and audio clips based on Smith faculty
research and interviews. —JH |
|
 Stock
trading is more mystical art than science, but it turns out
there is a piece of information that can make a real
difference to investing success.
Sunil Mithas, assistant professor of decision and
information technologies, worked with a team of researchers
led by Professor Claes Fornell from the University of
Michigan to manage a hypothetical paper portfolio and an
actual stock portfolio. They had a very simple trading
strategy: long positions were taken in companies with high
and increasing customer satisfaction rates, as measured by
the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI). Short
positions were taken in companies with low and decreasing
ACSI scores.
Over a period of four to six years, both these portfolios
outperformed the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the S&P
500. When the stock market grew, the stock prices of many
firms with very satisfied customers grew even more; when the
market dropped, customer satisfaction seemed to provide a
certain amount of insulation. It makes sense, right?
Satisfied customers are key to a company’s success. But the
knowledge of a company’s customer satisfaction is not
immediately reflected in a company’s stock price. That makes
it possible for investors to generate high returns with low
risk by incorporating customer satisfaction scores in their
stock trading strategy.
So if there’s such a strong correlation between customer
satisfaction and market equity, and if people intuitively
understand this, why don’t more investors make investment
choices based on customer satisfaction information?
Investors may believe that if customers are happy, then
companies are giving away too much for the price they are
charging customers. |
