Next, Jeroen D’Haen (UGent, see picture to the right) presented his research on using webcrawling for customer acquisition. We use publicly available information from B-to-B companies to do lead qualification. This is research initiated by Dr. Dirk Thorleuchter during his PhD.

Philippe Baecke (UGent, see picture to the left) talks about data augmentation. This builds on the theme of customer acquisition to use neighborhood data.

On Tuesday, Nicole Huyghe (@solutions_2, Managing Director at Solutions 2, see picture below) talked about pricing of financial services using conjoint analysis.

Dr. Anita Prinzie (Senior Analyst at Solutions 2 & visiting professor at UGent, see picture below) talked about marketing analytics using sequential information. She also discussed social media analytics.

Lunch breaks with vegetarian Indian food were also organized on campus in our Department of Marketing. During lunch the Indian bankers had the opportunity to informally talk to our guest speakers.

Patrick Vaneeckhout (Deputy CEO of AXA Bank Europe) discussed the impact of the financial crisis on the market share of different players. The unique positioning of AXA bank made them somewhat immune to the recent shocks.

After the afternoon tea/coffee break Andrew Pease (SAS Global Center of Excellence for Information Management and Analytics, see picture below) talked about Big Data opportunities in banking.

On Wednesday morning, Dr. Dries Benoit (UGent, see picture below) talked about CLV (customer lifetime value also abbreviated to LTV) in banking.

Next, Caroline Vervaeke and Marc De Reu (The House of Marketing, see picture below), the leading marketing consulting company in Belgium, talked about current developments in marketing.

On Thursday, Prof. Dr. Bart Larivière (UGent) gave an elaborate presentation about his research in the field of customer engagement.

Dr. Patrick Glenisson (KBC, Head of Customer Analytics and Market Research) talked about his journey towards marketing driven by analytics. He also discussed the organizational aspects to make it happen.

Friday morning, Matthias Meul (Customer Intelligence Analyst at Deutsche Bank Belgium) discussed several case studies how they use analytical customer relationship management.

Next, Tom Meere (Director of Qualitative Research, Why5Research, see picture below) talked about Market Research Insights for Banking: Importance & specific examples how to use them in marketing communications.

Then, it was lunch time. Thanks to the excellent weather we could have lunch outside. We also invited people from the UGent India Platform to join for lunch to facilitate contacts.

Friday afternoon, Andrey Volkov (UGent, see picture to the right) presented his research on marketing optimization, followed by a talk by Michel Ballings (@MichelBallings, UGent, see picture below) about the use of pictorial stimuli in market research to augment the customer database.

Finally, yours truly had the honor of formulating general conclusions and closing remarks about the five-day course. Achieving marketing analytics excellence is not an overnight operation. It requires many building blocks including (clinical trial-like) experiments to establish (direction of) causality, exploiting transactional data to its full potential (including sequence analysis), ... .

Next, we had some closing remarks by participants. It was nice to hear that some had just received a promotion (see picture below)! Congratulations. Many thanks again to Dr. Ravi, his director, and IDRBT in general for the nice cooperation. Many thanks to the participants for the lively and interesting discussions throughout the week! Preparations for the third 2013 edition are in full swing...

Here are some closing pictures taken throughout the week...

During his visit, Dr. Vadlamani Ravi (IDRBT) also gave an academic talk “Soft Computing Based Privacy Preserving Data Mining” at the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration of Ghent University.