The Wharton Customer Analytics Initiative is designed to connect decision-makers with deep academic research in Customer Analytics. Elea will overview the Analytics Initiative and then deep dive into the results of some of the key projects they’ve undertaken. She’ll review their findings on e-consumer behavior, social media, user-generated content, and beyond. She’ll cover the methods used by their research teams to study Customer behavior in a multi-channel world and the surprising findings that have been revealed by the research sponsored by the Wharton Customer Analytics Initiative.

This is a chance to see the best academic practice in Customer Analytics and get a sense for the potential depth and scope of serious research. It should provide a great benchmark for the types of reporting and analysis being done at the enterprise level.

About Elea McDonnell Feit:

Elea McDonnell Feit has spent most of her career developing quantitative methods that bridge the gap between theory and practice. She worked for more than 7 years as a research scientist at General Motors before entering the doctoral program in Marketing at the University of Michigan Ross School of Business, where her research was funded by the NSF Grant Opportunity for Academic Liaisons with Industry (GOALI) program. After completing her PhD, she was Vice President and Methodologist at The Modellers, where she led efforts to develop and commercialize new analytics methods and coordinated the company’s Academic Advisory Board. In her role as Research Director of the Wharton Customer Analytics Initiative, she leads academic-industry research programs ensuring that WCAI-sponsored projects have both rigor and relevance.

Elea's own research focuses on the intersection between consumer preferences and product design. Her methodological expertise includes Bayesian hierarchical models, Bayesian design of experiments, choice modeling, data fusion and discrete optimization heuristics. Her work has been published in Management Science and Marketing Letters. As a teacher, Elea enjoys making quantitative methods accessible to a broad audience and has recently co-taught tutorials at the Sawtooth Software Conference, the AMA ART forum and the Procter and Gamble Global Consumer Modeling conference and was honored with the Dykstra Fellowship for teaching excellence at The University of Michigan.

Elea earned her PhD in Marketing at the University of Michigan Ross School of Business. She holds a MS in Industrial Engineering from Lehigh University and a BA in Mathematics from the University of Pennsylvania.