By invitation, the Brierley Institute supports research by early career academics who are interested in advancing the state of the art in customer engagement.
Thanks to our deep relationships in the Dallas business community and beyond, the Institute serves an unmet need in the research community: we build a bridge to connect empirical investigators with businesses so that tests can use real customer data and respond to actual business challenges. The annual invitation-only Professors Institute helps foster these connections and the intelligence they yield.
My research revolves around loyalty programs and large customer databases. My specialty is modeling customer behavior to make better targeting decisions. I saw the opportunity to get involved with the Dallas business community through the Brierley Institute and that is part what attracted me to SMU Cox.
Assistant Professor of Marketing at SMU Cox and Brierley Fellow
We’re interested in exploring innovations and opportunities in travel, especially airlines and hotels. We’re also interested in retail, where we expect customer engagement programs to grow and expand.
We offer grants and support with company participation for the right projects.
Contact us if you’re a professor with a passion for customer engagement and a paper or project you’d like to submit.
What is the importance of “membership”?
How far will a customer go to obtain loyalty status?
What are the impacts of losing loyalty (or preferred) status or rewards?
How can brands be more empathetic?
How do a program component’s positioning and messaging impact enrollment?
The annual Professors Institute for Customer Engagement gathers together a select group of faculty peers from top academic institutions and C-suite practitioners from well-known corporations. In a rich, collaborative environment, they exchange ideas and insights to advance research agendas, improve curricula and solve today's pressing business challenges in the field of customer engagement.
A chance discovery of shared interests at the 2019 Professors Institute led Choaqun Chen and her co-author to propose a collaborative research project to the Brierley Institute. With the Institute’s support, they’re now ready for preliminary studies.
In 2020, the Brierley Institute partnered with Dynata on a national research initiative, seeking to understand evolving consumer sentiment about business’s responses to the COVID-19 pandemic and how customer engagement makes a difference. Over time, the team tracked trends in consumer sentiment, purchase intent and behavior during and after the pandemic.
If you wish to receive a copy of the national research reports, please complete the form below.