Knowledge that Transforms

Christopher Adams (“ The Sealed-Bid Abstraction in Online Auctions ”; “ Rejoinder—Causes and Implications to Some Bidders Not Conforming to the Sealed-Bid Abstraction ”) is a staff economist with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). He has a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Wisconsin and a B.Comm (Hons) from the University of Melbourne. At the FTC, he has worked on mergers and antitrust cases in a number of industries including pharmaceuticals, real estate, software, and retail. Before joining the FTC, he taught at the University of Vermont. In 2007, he was awarded the FTC's Paul Rand Dixon Award for outstanding contributions to the Commission. Paulo Albuquerque (“ Online Demand Under Limited Consumer Search ”) is an assistant professor of marketing at the Simon Graduate School of Business, University of Rochester. He holds a Ph.D. in management from the UCLA Anderson School of Management. He is currently interested in competition and consumer behavior in online markets, new product diffusion across markets, and spatial competition models. Bart J. Bronnenberg (“ Online Demand Under Limited Consumer Search ”) is a professor of marketing and CentER research fellow at Tilburg University. He holds Ph.D. and M.Sc. degrees in management from INSEAD, Fontainebleau, France, and an M.S. in industrial engineering from Twente University, The Netherlands. He is currently interested in marketing strategy and multimarket competition in consumer goods and medical industries. He has previously worked, and continues to work, on empirical analyses of new product growth and consumer choice behavior. He was named the recipient of the 2003 and 2008 Paul Green Award, the 2003 International Journal of Research in Marketing (IJRM) Best Paper Award, and the 2004 John D. C. Little Best Paper Award. Anne T. Coughlan (“ Optimal Reverse Channel Structure for Consumer Product Returns ”) is the John L. and Helen Kellogg Professor of Marketing at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. Her research on channel design and compensation problems, sales force management, sales force compensation, and pricing has been published in the top journals for marketing and operation and decision technologies. She is an area editor for Marketing Science and an author of the Marketing Channels textbook. Her favorite leisure activity is cultivating cacti and succulents in her greenhouse. Brett Danaher (“ Converting Pirates Without Cannibalizing Purchasers: The Impact of Digital Distribution on Physical Sales and Internet Piracy ”) is an assistant professor of economics at Wellesley College. He received a bachelor's of science in economics from Haverford College and a Ph.D. in managerial science and applied economics from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. His research interests include digital media, intellectual property, and the economics of information goods. Marnik G. Dekimpe (“ Estimating Cannibalization Rates for Pioneering Innovations ”) is a research professor at Tilburg University (The Netherlands) and a professor of marketing at the Catholic University Leuven (Belgium), and he is currently an academic trustee with both MSI and AiMark. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles. He has advised several key players in the consumer packaged goods industry, especially on private-label and marketing-mix effectiveness issues. He has won best paper awards at Marketing Science, the Journal of Marketing Research, the International Journal of Research in Marketing, and Technological Forecasting and Social Change. He has also won the 2010 Louis W. Stern Award for his work on the valuation of Internet channels. He serves as editor for the International Journal of Research in Marketing and serves on the editorial boards of Marketing Science, the Journal of Marketing, the Journal of Marketing Research, Marketing Letters, the Review of Marketing Science, and the Journal of Interactive Marketing. Samita Dhanasobhon (“ Converting Pirates Without Cannibalizing Purchasers: The Impact of Digital Distribution on Physical Sales and Internet Piracy ”) is a Ph.D. candidate in public policy and management at the Heinz College, Carnegie Mellon University. Her research interests include digital piracy, digital media, and e-commerce marketing. Peter S. Fader (“ Customer-Base Analysis in a Discrete-Time Noncontractual Setting ”) is the Frances and Pei-Yuan Chia Professor of Marketing at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and codirector of the Wharton Interactive Media Initiative. Scott Fay (“ The Economics of Buyer Uncertainty: Advance Selling vs. Probabilistic Selling ”) is an assistant professor of marketing at the Whitman School of Management at Syracuse University. He received a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Michigan and previously taught at the Warrington College of Business of the University of Florida. In his research, he employs analytical modeling to study a variety of topics, many of which are related to e-commerce, including reverse auctions, opaque products, the personalization process, the bundling of information goods, shipping fee schedules, retail price endings, and consumer bankruptcy. He was elected to and served two terms as the newsletter editor for the INFORMS Society for Marketing Science (2002–2006). He serves on the editorial board of Marketing Science, served as a guest area editor for Marketing Science, and recently received the Meritorious Service Award from Management Science. Bruce G. S. Hardie (“ Customer-Base Analysis in a Discrete-Time Noncontractual Setting ”) is a professor of marketing at the London Business School. His primary research interest lies in the development of data-based models to support marketing analysts and decision makers, with a particular interest in models that are easy to implement. Most of his current projects focus on the development of probability models for customer-base analysis. Ernan Haruvy (“ Search and Choice in Online Consumer Auctions ”) is an associate professor of marketing at the University of Texas at Dallas. He received his Ph.D. in economics in 1999 from the University of Texas at Austin. His research focuses primarily on market design, with a special interest in auctions, procurement, learning, and bounded rationality. Gerald Häubl (“ Optimal Reverse-Pricing Mechanisms ”) is the Canada Research Chair in Behavioral Science and an associate professor of marketing at the University of Alberta's School of Business. He is the founding director of the Institute for Online Consumer Studies (IOCS). He received M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in business administration and marketing from the Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration (Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien) in his native Austria. His primary research interests are consumer decision making, the construction of preference and value, human–information interaction, decision assistance for consumers, and bidding behavior in interactive-pricing markets. Ali Hortaçsu (“ Commentary—Do Bids Equal Values on eBay? ”) is a professor of economics at the University of Chicago. He received his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 2001, and his main research area is industrial organization. He has developed novel econometric methods to study auction and matchmaking markets, and he has applied these methods to answer market design questions in central bank operations, government bond auctions, electricity markets, online auctions, and online matchmaking. He has also developed empirical methods to study markets with search frictions, with applications to e-commerce and the mutual fund industry. He has been awarded an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship and an NSF CAREER grant and is a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. He has served as the coeditor for the International Journal of Industrial Organization and as associate editor for the Journal of Business and Economic Statistics and the Journal of Industrial Economics. Sandy Jap (“ The Seeds of Dissolution: Discrepancy and Incoherence in Buyer–Supplier Exchange ”) is the Dean's Term Chair Professor of Marketing at the Goizueta Business School at Emory University. She is a graduate of the University of Florida (Go Gators!) and has served on the faculties of the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Her research interests lie in interorganizational exchange management and the design and management of business-to-business markets with auction mechanisms. She is an area editor for the International Journal of Research in Marketing and an editorial board member of the Journal of Marketing Research and Marketing Letters. Ujwal Kayande (“ The Seeds of Dissolution: Discrepancy and Incoherence in Buyer–Supplier Exchange ”) is a professor of marketing in the Research School of Business at the Australian National University. He was previously on the faculty at the Smeal College of Business (Pennsylvania State University) and the Australian Graduate School of Management (University of New South Wales, Sydney). He obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Alberta. His current research focuses on developing quantitative models to understand marketplace behavior and the effect of marketing activity upon that behavior; additionally, he is interested in understanding the pathways by which quantitative models impact business practice. He is a recipient of the 1998 Don Lehmann Award from the American Marketing Association. Jun B. Kim (“ Online Demand Under Limited Consumer Search ”) is an assistant professor at the College of Management, Georgia Institu

René Algesheimer (“ The Impact of Customer Community Participation on Customer Behaviors: An Empirical Investigation ”) is a professor of marketing and market research at the University of Zurich. He has a diploma in mathematics from the University of Mainz, Germany, and a doctorate in marketing from the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland. His research focus lies in studying contextual effects in consumer preferences formation and decision making. He has published a number of articles about virtual communities and contextual multilevel effects in marketing and management journals, and he frequently cooperates with Internet companies. Subramanian Balachander (“ Why Bundle Discounts Can Be a Profitable Alternative to Competing on Price Promotions ”) is an associate professor of management at Purdue University's Krannert School of Management. He has a Ph.D. in industrial administration from Carnegie Mellon University. His research interests are in competitive marketing strategy, pricing, sales promotions, and market signaling. He was recognized as a Purdue University Faculty Scholar in 2009. His research has been published in the Journal of Marketing, Management Science, Marketing Science, the Journal of Consumer Research, Review of Marketing Science, and Marketing Letters. Sharad Borle (“ The Impact of Customer Community Participation on Customer Behaviors: An Empirical Investigation ”) is an associate professor of marketing at the Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Business, Rice University, Houston. He holds an MBA degree from the XLRI Institute of Management, Jamshedpur, India, and a Ph.D. from the Carnegie Mellon University. His research interests include Bayesian econometrics and the application of quantitative methods to study consumer behavior. Pradeep K. Chintagunta (“ The Effect of Signal Quality and Contiguous Word of Mouth on Customer Acquisition for a Video-on-Demand Service ”; “ Complementarities and the Demand for Home Broadband Internet Services ”) is the Robert Law Professor of Marketing at the Booth School of Business, University of Chicago. His research interests include understanding pharmaceutical, media, technology, and entertainment markets as well as studying consumer packaged goods markets. Jack (Xinlei) Chen (“ An Empirical Investigation of Private Label Supply by National Label Producers ”) is an assistant professor in marketing at the Sauder School of Business, University of British Columbia. He received his Ph.D. in marketing from the University of Minnesota and his B.Eng. from Tsinghua University, China. His research interests center around firms' strategic actions and irrationality/externality in consumers' choices. In his spare time, he enjoys sports, reading, and spending time with his kids. Yuxin Chen (“ Limited Memory, Categorization, and Competition ”) is the Polk Brothers Professor in Retailing and a professor of marketing at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University. He holds a Ph.D. in marketing from Washington University in St. Louis. His primary research areas include competitive strategy, database and Internet marketing, Bayesian econometric methods, and behavior economics. He is an area editor for Marketing Science and serves as an associate editor for the Journal of Marketing Research, Management Science, and Quantitative Marketing and Economics. His research has appeared in journals such as Marketing Science, the Journal of Marketing Research, Management Science, and Quantitative Marketing and Economics. Marnik G. Dekimpe (“ Return on Roller Coasters: A Model to Guide Investments in Theme Park Attractions ”) is a research professor at Tilburg University, The Netherlands, and a professor of marketing at the Catholic University Leuven, Belgium. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles. He has won best paper awards for Marketing Science (1995, 2001), the Journal of Marketing Research (1999), the International Journal of Research in Marketing (1997, 2001, 2002), and Technological Forecasting and Social Change (2000). He has also won the 2010 Louis W. Stern Award for his work on the valuation of Internet channels. He is an academic trustee with both the Marketing Science Institute and AiMark. He serves as editor of the International Journal of Research in Marketing and also serves on the editorial boards of Marketing Science, the Journal of Marketing, the Journal of Marketing Research, Marketing Letters, Review of Marketing Science, and the Journal of Interactive Marketing. Tirtha Dhar (“ An Empirical Investigation of Private Label Supply by National Label Producers ”) is an assistant professor of marketing at the Sauder School of Business, University of British Columbia. He received his Ph.D. in agricultural and resource economics from the University of Connecticut and M.A. in economics from the Delhi School of Economics. His current research interests deal with marketing and public policy, channel bargaining, and the role of information in online markets. Utpal M. Dholakia (“ The Impact of Customer Community Participation on Customer Behaviors: An Empirical Investigation ”) is the William S. Mackey and Verne F. Simons associate professor of management at the Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Management, Rice University. He has a master's degree in psychology and a Ph.D. in marketing from the University of Michigan, as wells as a master's degree in operations research from The Ohio State University. His research interests lie in studying motivational psychology of consumers and online marketing issues such as virtual communities and online auctions. He has published in a number of marketing and management journals and consults with firms in financial services, energy, health care, and high-tech industries. Paul W. Dobson (“ For a Few Cents More: Why Supersize Unhealthy Food? ”) is the head of Norwich Business School at the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom. He was previously the Storaid Professor of Retailing and Professor of Competition Economics at Loughborough University and has also held posts at the University of Nottingham and the University of St Andrews. His research interests span marketing, economics, strategy, and public policy, and he is currently focusing on the dynamics of price competition in grocery retailing and the impact of retail pricing on overeating and food waste. Eitan Gerstner (“ For a Few Cents More: Why Supersize Unhealthy Food? ”) is a professor of marketing at the Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management, Technion–Israel Institute of Technology. He received a B.A. in statistics and economics (1976) from Haifa University Israel, and he received his M.A. (1980) and Ph.D. in economics (1983) from the University of California, San Diego. He works in the areas of pricing, service marketing, and marketing strategies, and his research has appeared in leading academic journals. His most recent research focuses on pricing under uncertain demand, customer acquisition and referrals, customer service and satisfaction, and public policy measures to fight obesity and food waste. Anindya Ghose (“ Analyzing the Relationship Between Organic and Sponsored Search Advertising: Positive, Negative, or Zero Interdependence? ”) is an assistant professor of information, operations, and management sciences at New York University's Stern School of Business. His primary research seeks to analyze two related issues: the economic impact of the Internet on industries transformed by its technology infrastructure, and the economic value of user-generated content in social media as well as the means for monetization such content through online advertising. In 2007, he received the prestigious National Science Foundation CAREER Award for his work on quantifying the economic value of user-generated content on the Internet. He is also a winner of a 2005 ACM SIGMIS Doctoral Dissertation Award, a 2006 Microsoft Live Labs Award, and a 2007 Microsoft Virtual Earth Award. He serves as an associate editor of Management Science and Information Systems Research. His work has been published or is forthcoming in leading journals such as Information Systems Research, the Journal of Management Information Systems, the Journal of Economics and Management Strategy, MIS Quarterly, Management Science, Marketing Letters, Marketing Science, and Statistical Science. Bikram Ghosh (“ Why Bundle Discounts Can Be a Profitable Alternative to Competing on Price Promotions ”; “ Advertising Effectiveness, Digital Video Recorders, and Product Market Competition ”) is an assistant professor of marketing at the Moore School of Business, University of South Carolina. He holds an M.S. in economics and a Ph.D. in management with specialization in marketing from Purdue University. His research focuses on product bundling, pricing, and competitive strategy. He is also interested on the effect of advertising avoidance technologies such as digital video recorders on product market competition. His research has appeared in Marketing Science and Management Science. Wesley R. Hartmann (“ Demand Estimation with Social Interactions and the Implications for Targeted Marketing ”) is an associate professor of marketing at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He holds a Ph.D. in economics from the University of California, Los Angeles. He is interested in applying and developing econometric techniques to analyze questions relevant to marketing and economics. His current research focuses on dynamic choice contexts, pricing, social interactions, and targeted marketing. Ganesh Iyer (“ Limited Memory, Categorization, and Competition ”) is the Edgar F. Kaiser Professor of Business Administration at the

Greg M. Allenby (“ Investigating the Strategic Influence of Customer and Employee Satisfaction on Firm Financial Performance ”) is the Helen C. Kurtz Chair in Marketing at Ohio State University. He specializes in the study of economic and statistical issues in marketing. His research deals with developing new insights about consumer behavior from customer data routinely collected by most organizations; these insights are used to develop and improve product development, pricing, promotion, market segmentation, and target marketing activities. He is a fellow of the American Statistical Association, coauthor of Bayesian Statistics and Marketing (Wiley, 2005), and coeditor of Quantitative Marketing and Economics. Subhajyoti Bandyopadhyay (“ Equilibrium Returns Policies in the Presence of Supplier Competition ”) is an assistant professor in the Department of Information Systems and Operations Management at the University of Florida, Gainesville. He received his Ph.D. in management information systems from Purdue University in 2002. His current research interests include economics of information systems and information systems policy issues, especially in the area of net neutrality, national broadband policy, and health informatics. Jonah Berger (“ Positive Effects of Negative Publicity: When Negative Reviews Increase Sales ”) is an assistant professor of marketing at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He received a Ph.D. in marketing from the Stanford Graduate School of Business in 2007 and a B.A. in human judgment and decision making from Stanford University in 2002. His research examines how individual decision making and social dynamics (e.g., social influence) between people generate collective outcomes such as social contagion and trends. Bart J. Bronnenberg (“ An Empirical Analysis of Assortment Similarities Across U.S. Supermarkets ”) is a professor of marketing and a CentER fellow at the Tilburg School of Economics and Management of Tilburg University, The Netherlands. He holds Ph.D. and M.S. degrees in management from INSEAD, Fontainebleau, France, and an M.S. in industrial engineering from Twente University, The Netherlands. He is interested marketing strategy, the persistence of branding effects, and the structure of CPG markets, and he continues to work on empirical analyses of new product growth and consumer choice behavior. He was named the recipient of the 2003 and 2008 Paul Green Award, the 2003 IJRM Best Paper Award, and the 2004 John D. C. Little Best Paper Award. Michael Brusco (“ Multicriterion Market Segmentation: A New Model, Implementation, and Evaluation ”) is a professor in the marketing department at Florida State University, where he teaches courses in operations research, operations management, and marketing research. He received a Ph.D. in management science from Florida State University in 1990. His research focuses on the development of exact and approximate algorithms for combinatorial optimization problems in the areas of scheduling, layout, and computational statistics. Pradeep K. Chintagunta (“ The Effects of Online User Reviews on Movie Box Office Performance: Accounting for Sequential Rollout and Aggregation Across Local Markets ”) is the Robert Law Professor of Marketing at the Booth School of Business, University of Chicago. He is interested in studying strategic interactions among firms in vertical and horizontal relationships, in measuring the effectiveness of marketing activities in pharmaceutical markets, in investigating aspects of technology product markets, and in the analysis of household purchase behavior in online and off-line markets. Jeffrey P. Dotson (“ Investigating the Strategic Influence of Customer and Employee Satisfaction on Firm Financial Performance ”) is an assistant professor of marketing in the Owen Graduate School of Management at Vanderbilt University. He holds a Ph.D. in marketing from Ohio State University and master's degrees in statistics and business administration from the University of Utah. His research focuses on the application of Bayesian statistics to a variety of marketing problems, including linking customers and employee satisfaction to firm performance and developing more accurate models of consumer decision making. His work has appeared in Quantitative Marketing and Economics. Shyam Gopinath (“ The Effects of Online User Reviews on Movie Box Office Performance: Accounting for Sequential Rollout and Aggregation Across Local Markets ”) is a doctoral student in marketing at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University. He has master's degrees in industrial management and statistics from IIT Madras and the University of Virginia, respectively. He also has a bachelor's degree in industrial engineering from the University of Kerala. His research focuses on two areas: studying the impact of online word of mouth on firm performance and understanding customer purchasing behavior in noncontractual settings using probability models. Minha Hwang (“ An Empirical Analysis of Assortment Similarities Across U.S. Supermarkets ”) is a Ph.D. candidate in marketing at the UCLA Anderson School of Management. He holds a Ph.D. in materials science and engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research focuses on empirical analyses of assortment and store brands in U.S. supermarkets. Shailendra P. Jain (“ Stock Market Response to Regulatory Reports of Deceptive Advertising: The Moderating Effect of Omission Bias and Firm Reputation ”) is an associate professor of marketing at the University of Washington's Michael G. Foster School of Business and has previously held faculty positions at Indiana University's Kelley School, Cornell University's Johnson School, and University of Rochester's Simon School. He received his Ph.D. and M.Phil. from New York University's Stern School, an M.B.A. from the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, India, and a chemical engineering degree from Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, India. He conducts research in branding, comparative advertising, consumer behavior and marketing strategy, cross-cultural and other individual differences in thought and consumption, and economics of information. He is on the editorial board of Journal of Consumer Psychology and has co-chaired the 2009 Society for Consumer Psychology Conference and the 2005 American Psychological Association's Division 23 Conference. He has received several teaching excellence awards, including the PACCAR Award at University of Washington's Foster School of Business. Kamel Jedidi (“ Dynamic Allocation of Pharmaceutical Detailing and Sampling for Long-Term Profitability ”) is the John A. Howard Professor of Marketing at Columbia Business School, Columbia University, New York. He holds a bachelor's degree in economics from the Faculté des Sciences Economiques de Tunis, Tunisia, and master's and Ph.D. degrees in marketing from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. His substantive research interests include pricing, product design and positioning, diffusion of innovations, market segmentation, and the long-term impact of advertising and promotions. His methodological interests lie in multidimensional scaling, classification, structural equation modeling, and Bayesian and finite-mixture models. He was awarded the 1998 International Journal of Research in Marketing Best Article Award and the Marketing Science Institute Best Paper Award in 2000. He was also a finalist for the 2009 Paul Green Award for the Journal of Marketing Research and the 2009 Long-Term Impact Award for Marketing Science and Management Science. Dmitri Kuksov (“ Pricing, Frills, and Customer Ratings ”) is an associate professor of marketing at Olin Business School, Washington University in St. Louis, and he has a Ph.D. in marketing from the Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley. His research interests include studying competitive strategy, consumer and firm behavior in markets with incomplete information, consumer communication and networks, branding and product line strategy, and customer satisfaction. He is currently an associate editor at Management Science and Quantitative Marketing and Economics, and he is on the editorial board of Marketing Science. He received the 2005 Frank M. Bass Dissertation Award, and two of his papers were finalists for the 2007 John D. C. Little Award. Charles Lindsey (“ Stock Market Response to Regulatory Reports of Deceptive Advertising: The Moderating Effect of Omission Bias and Firm Reputation ”) is an assistant professor of marketing in the School of Management at the State University of New York, Buffalo. He received his Ph.D. and master's in business from Indiana University's Kelley School of Business. He also holds an M.B.A. and a B.S. in accounting (magna cum laude) from St. Louis University's Cook School of Business. He conducts research in branding, marketing strategy, consumer behavior, group and cross-functional team effectiveness, and information recognition and memory. He serves as an ad hoc reviewer for the Journal of Consumer Psychology, Journal of Consumer Research, and Journal of Experimental Psychology. He is a member of the conference committee for the 2010 Society for Consumer Psychology Conference. He has received several teaching/research excellence awards, including the inaugural Dean's Fellowship for Research Excellence Award at the State University of New York, Buffalo. Ying Liu (“ Multicriterion Market Segmentation: A New Model, Implementation, and Evaluation ”) is an assistant professor in the Department of Information Systems of the College of Business Administration at the California State Univ

This methodological article investigates practical challenges that emerge when conducting customer satisfaction surveys (CSS) for financial service providers such as banks, insurance or leasing companies, and so forth. It displays methodological recommendations in reference with: (a) survey design, (b) sampling, (c) survey method, (d) questionnaire design, and (e) data acquisition. Article provides appropriate explanations that usage of: two-stage survey design, SRS method, large samples, and rigorous fieldwork preparation can enhance the overall quality of CSS in financial services. Proposed methodological recommendations can primarily be applied to the primary quantitative marketing research in retail financial services. However, majority of them can be successfully applied when conducting primary quantitative marketing research in corporate financial services as well. .

Investments into communications mix are specific because besides significant financial resources it also involves creative marketing ideas that are a result of imagination and experience. However, the application of direct marketing communication mix is like 'a cave on iceberg'. The visible aspect presented through promotional content is only a small part of the whole process including experts from different fields. The process of creation a new communication mix of direct marketing must fully use all the challenges posed by sophisticated technology. Direct marketing depicted by new technology (cable television, telemarketing and the Internet) can substantially increase the competitive advantage of enterprises in attracting their customer's attention and creating their loyalty as well. The companies use the mentioned media more frequently in order to create such offers that will lead towards strengthening loyalty of the existing customers, while simultaneously attracting those customers who were previously making purchases with our direct competitors. Hence, an offer as a creatively designed marketing vehicle proposes a number of potential benefits to a client. However, the client will be able to claim those benefits only in the case when a customer takes action as suggested by a communicated message. Basically, those are 'the rules of the game' that regulate relationship between company and client in direct marketing. Creating offers which guide the process of direct marketing is in the domain of customer relations management. Without an attractive offer, consumers will not create any type of measurable response to a company and therefore relations with clients would never emerge. On the other hand, if a company fails to continuously follow client's needs and wants, those engaged in direct sales will not be able to create adequate offers that would satisfy clients and motivate them to repeat purchases. .