Thought Leaders II
Wharton Professor Goes to Bat for Baseball

Professor David Reibstein has spent close to 30 years helping major league companies identify and target their most profitable customers, from the petroleum industry to the pharmaceuticals industry. His expertise in marketing attracted the Commissioner of Baseball, and earlier this year Reibstein joined a special task force of marketing professionals asked to look "at the future shape of the game and how we can increase interest in baseball," he said.

"We're approaching this as any other services marketing activity," said Reibstein, co-academic director of the upcoming class, Strategic Growth for the Service Function: Building Value Through Customer Focus. "We'll first work on identifying the factors that are driving the current decline and figure out which strategies could best be used to help fix the situation."

Sports teams, like other service industries, have "tons of competitors" in drawing the attention of fans. It's easy to get caught up in the belief that being a services-oriented industry is radically different from other sectors. This is a common trap that can negatively affect profitability, Reibstein said. "I argue that there are more similarities between services industries and other sectors than there are differences," he said. And these differences can actually turn out to be advantages. "It is often much harder to standardize your product in the services industry because you are so dependent on individual employees and how they deliver your product. But this can be used as an advantage because it is easier to personalize and adapt your product."

Different employees can have different perspectives on not only who their customers are, but who their competitors are as well. When he was consulting with a major oil company, Reibstein asked a group of service station dealers to identify their biggest competitors. He was surprised to hear them name other dealers from the same company in their area. "This certainly was news to the corporate side,"Reibstein said. He helped implement meetings for all company dealers in an area to come together and share information and to help convince them of the value of the brand. "We worked on communicating the value of the notion of the brand, how that value loses meaning if customers have vastly different experiences at different stations."

Professor Reibstein also teaches in Competitive Marketing Strategy.

• Wharton Executive Education
  
  
• The Wharton School

This month's articles:

• In the Classroom I: Return on Education
  A CFO uses scenario-planning techniques practiced during The CFO to take his business in new directions.
  
  
• In the Classroom II: Dealmaker
  The best negotiators, says Wharton Practice Professor Stuart Diamond, are the ones who put their own sweat into the game.
  
  
• Thought Leaders I: Connecting Strategy to Finance
  You say finance; I say strategy. To John Percival, they're one and the same.
  
  
• Thought Leaders II: Going to Bat for Baseball
  A dream team of marketing pros are on deck to get baseball out of its slump.
  
  
• The Last Word: Cumulative Returns
  Wanted: Educated Employees for the Knowledge Economy.