Nationwide, Ohio State Create Center for Advanced Consumer Insights |
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Written by U. S. Insurance News
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Monday, 30 June 2008 |
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Why do consumers buy what they buy?
That’s just one of the many questions that professors, graduate
students, and staff from the Fisher College of Business at The Ohio
State University (OSU) will seek to answer as part of the work of the
new Nationwide Center for Advanced Customer Insights. The partnership
between the business college and Nationwide Insurance creates one of
the few centers in the country dedicated to researching and evaluating
consumer behavior.
The center will identify and formulate business, marketing, and operations research problems. Then, OSU faculty, staff, and students will apply creative research to solving practical business problems.
“This partnership will allow us to foster innovative results by combining a broad base of academic disciplines including statistics, behavioral science, economics, and marketing to help address the most pressing problems we face every day,” said James Lyski, chief marketing officer for Nationwide Insurance.
The insurance company will take the knowledge gained from this research as a foundation for creating ways to capture new markets, develop new products, enhance existing markets and products, and improve profitability. In addition, the center will enhance student career opportunities by providing them the chance to develop more marketable skill sets.
“One of the greatest challenges for business scholars engaged in empirical research is organizational entry, gaining access to firms as research sites and the data they possess,” said Stephen L. Mangum, interim dean for the Fisher College of Business. “This new center will offer OSU faculty and graduate students seminal research opportunities and direct access to Nationwide’s customer and marketing data and direct access to Nationwide marketing executives.”
OSU will staff and manage the new center, and Nationwide will provide an executive-in-residence, who will work on-site in the center. Tom Bishop, an associate professor in the OSU Department of Statistics, has been named the center’s director.
“Ohio State researchers, using state-of-the-art predictive modeling, data mining, and advanced analytical techniques, can help improve the understanding of customer behavior and consumer purchasing patterns,” said Bishop.
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