PhD Thesis Defense Presentation: Aysun Mutlu
Ms. Aysun Mutlu, a doctoral student at McGill University in the Operations Management area will be presenting her thesis defense entitled:
Customer Engagement with Promotional Incentives in Subscription-based Businesses
Monday, May 26, 2025, at 1:00 p.m.
(The defense will be conducted in hybrid mode)
Student Committee Co-chairs: Professor Saibal Ray and Professor Mehmet Gumus
Please note that the Defence will be conducted in hybrid mode.
Abstract
Customer engagement remains a critical challenge in retail management, particularly within subscription-based business models. While companies employ various promotional incentives to drive engagement and enhance customer lifetime value, the effectiveness and long-term impact of these strategies require further investigation. Subscription services, especially in the food sector, have experienced significant growth in recent years, making it essential to understand how different promotion framings influence customer behavior over time. This research seeks to contribute to this understanding through randomized field experiments and prescriptive analytical models, analyzing both the immediate and long-term effects of promotional strategies.
The first study introduces the experimental design and examines the immediate impact of various promotional approaches. It provides an in-depth analysis of the experiment, which investigates how different incentive structures affect customer engagement and basket size. This analysis also explores variations in promotional effectiveness across distinct customer segments through heterogeneity analysis.
The second study shifts focus to long-term engagement and the effects of delayed rewards. By incorporating post-experiment data, this section evaluates how promotions influence customer retention and lifetime value. It also presents findings from employing model-free analysis and statistical techniques, including difference-in-differences, to measure the sustained impact of promotions and their interactions with customer behavior over time.
The third study develops an analytical model for optimizing promotional strategies, integrating insights from the previous experiments. This prescriptive model provides actionable business recommendations, identifying the most effective promotion types, frequencies, target customer segments, and budget allocation strategies. By offering a structured approach to maximizing promotional effectiveness, the model aids managerial decision-making in balancing short-term engagement with long-term customer value. Through this structured analysis, the thesis aims to enhance the understanding of promotional effectiveness in subscription-based business models while providing practical managerial insights for improving customer engagement strategies.
