Andrea Ordanini Studies Marketing in the Era of Services

THE HOLDER OF THE NEW BNP PARIBAS CHAIR OF MARKETING AND SERVICE ANALYTICS HAS OVERTURNED HIS DISCIPLINE'S PERSPECTIVE, TRADITIONALLY FOCUSED ON TANGIBLE GOODS. THE CHAIR WILL BE INAUGURATED ON 13 SEPTEMBER

The service sector is an important component of the economy, yet most marketing studies are based on a conceptual framework that originated in relation to tangible goods. A change in perspective and the use of tools specifically designed for studying service organizations are at the core of the research activity of Andrea Ordanini, Full professor at the Department of Marketing and newly appointed BNP Paribas Professor in Marketing and Service Analytics (CLICK HERE to register for the Lectio Inauguralis, on 13, September). “This is an excellent opportunity to do research with a counterpart that will allow academic experimentation”, Professor Ordanini says about the Chair. “We will collaborate on field experiments and will analyze the impact of artificial intelligence on the supply structure and financial results. The research will benefit from interaction with managers. The students will become involved by the donor in projects and experiments regarding new services”.
 
Five-star luxury innovation
Services marketing requires new analysis tools. The literature on innovation, for instance, is traditionally focused on tangible goods development. This approach is non-replicable in the case of service companies. In Service innovation viewed through a service-dominant logic lens: a conceptual framework and empirical analysis, which is one of his most popular papers and winner of the 2011 Journal of Service Research Best Article Award, Ordanini proposes, along with A. Parasuraman, a conceptual framework to investigate service innovation. The authors tested their hypotheses using a sample of five-star luxury Italian hotels. “We asked ourselves: what makes luxury hotels innovative and successful? We observed an element that, more than any other, fosters innovation: the ability to collaborate with business partners and customers”. In another paper, Ordanini and Parasuraman, along with Gaia Rubera, investigated the idea that the adoption of a new service does not depend on individual service attributes, as happens with tangible goods. “We have used qualitative comparative analysis, a technique that is new to service research”, Ordanini says. The authors tested their framework in the context of the Italian luxury hotels, examining a service that was awarded as innovative. “We investigated the consumers’ decision process and found out that only specific combinations of attributes act as sufficient conditions for new service adoption”. The recipe is more important than the individual ingredients.
 
From crowdfunding to text mining
Andrea Ordanini investigated crowdfunding in 2011, when the phenomenon had not yet been adequately analyzed. In Crowd-funding: transforming customers into investors through innovative service platforms, one of his most highly cited papers, he outlined three cases of crowdfunding initiatives: pre-sale models, which eventually evolved in the form of Kickstarter; equity models, which are based on the idea of the consumer as an investor; and philanthropic models that give a psychological pay-off.
Ordanini has more recently investigated text mining techniques to study the effects of online reviews. “The research has dealt with consumer responses to these reviews. We know much less about the use that managers eventually make of user generated content”. Andrea Ordanini, Raji Srinivasan and Anastasia Nanni have conducted a field experiment. One hundred and fifty small and medium sized Italian hotels were divided into two groups. The control group was given a report with a quantitative summary of Tripadvisor reviews. The experimental group was given the quantitative summary and a text mining output, that is word cloud and sentiment analysis. After six months, the hotels belonging to the experimental group recorded a 5.4% increase in the Tripadvisor score, which is pretty significant in that time span. “Having the text mining output has given these hotels the opportunity to spot their weaknesses and improve their service. We have also found two conditions that multiply or eliminate the effect: the level of accountability of managers, which leads to a further increase in the score, and the self-perception of past performance. Managers who were satisfied with their performance before the experiment did not work to improve service quality”.
 
Find out more
A. Ordanini, A Parasuraman, Service innovation viewed through a service-dominant logic lens: a conceptual framework and empirical analysis, in Journal of Service Research, 2010.
 
A. Ordanini, A. Parasuraman, G. Rubera, When the recipe is more important than the ingredients: A qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) of service innovation configurations, in Journal of Service Research, 2014.
 
A. Ordanini, L. Miceli, M. Pizzetti, A. Parasuraman, Crowd-funding: transforming customers into investors through innovative service platforms, in Journal of service management, 2011.
 
A. Ordanini, R. Srinivasan, A. Nanni, Making Words Speak: Leveraging Consumer Insights from Online Review Text to Improve Service Quality, working paper.

by Claudio Todesco