Faculty
Peter S. Fader
Peter S. Fader is the Frances and Pei-Yuan Chia Professor of Marketing at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. His expertise centers around the analysis of behavioral data to understand and forecast customer shopping/purchasing activities. He works with firms from a wide range of industries, such as consumer packaged goods, interactive media, financial services, retailing, and pharmaceuticals. Managerial applications focus on topics such as customer relationship management, lifetime value of the customer, and sales forecasting for new products. Much of his research highlights the consistent (but often surprising) behavioral patterns that exist across these industries and other seemingly different domains. These insights are reflected in his book, Customer Centricity: Focus on the Right Customers for Strategic Advantage.
David Wessels
David Wessels is an Adjunct Professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Named by BusinessWeek as one of the nation’s top business school instructors, David teaches courses on corporate valuation, investment banking, and venture capital to undergraduates, MBAs, and executives in Philadelphia and San Francisco. He has been recognized by his students with the school’s top MBA teaching award, and recognized nationally for his research on organizational structure and financial performance. His book, Valuation: Measuring and Managing the Value of Companies, co-authored with McKinsey & Company partners Tim Koller and Marc Goedhart, is a standard text for corporate valuation and performance management.
Sarah Toms
Sarah E. Toms is executive director and co-founder of Wharton Interactive. She is a demonstrated thought leader in the educational technology field, fueled by a passion to find and develop innovative ways to make every learning environment active, engaging, more meaningful, and learner-centered. Her drive to modernize, transform, and democratize education led Sarah and her team to co-invent simpl.world, an open source simulation framework. She has spent more than twenty years as a leader in the technology sphere, and was an entrepreneur for more than a decade, founding companies that built global CRM, product development, productivity management, and financial systems. In addition, she is coauthor with Peter S. Fader of The Customer Centricity Playbook. She is dedicated to supporting women and girls in the technology field through her work with the Women in Tech Summit and techgirlz.org
“Customer centricity” is a management framework that challenges companies to build stronger relationships with customers through the use of data. But there are different, and often contradictory, perspectives about what customer centricity really means. This hands-on workshop serves to clarify the “customer centric” path, define the advantages of this shift from a “product centric” approach, and outline key elements for successful implementation in your firm.