Benoit Aubert
France
Associate Dean - Director of the Doctoral School
Senior Professor, Marketing
Areas of expertise
Customer/Client Satisfaction, E-Learning, Consumer Education
Contact
+33 4 76 70 62 86 - Office F904
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Benoit AUBERT is The Associate Dean Director of the Doctoral School in charge of the development and organisation of the doctoral programs. He is also program director of the DBA program run in Lebanon and in France (opening in 2012). As an associate marketing professor at Grenoble Ecole de Management, he teaches courses on CRM, customer education, consumer behaviour, quantitative marketing and principles of marketing. His main research interest in marketing is customer education. His DBA thesis examined the effects of customer education on customer behaviour and satisfaction. He is involved in the Institut du Capital Client (customer care research institute) and has written several papers on customer education, customer satisfaction and CRM.
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Articles in Refeered Journals
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This paper focuses on customer education, an original approach that is increasingly used for consumer products. With the help of the little existing research and the testimony of two pioneer companies in this field, customer education is first defined and then its principles of implementation are discussed. The effects on consumer behavior are analyzed and empirically validated through a study in the field of consumer electronics. The benefits are shown on the evolution of consumer skills, on the use of products and on customer satisfaction.
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Despite a strong interest for CRM in the late nineties, CRM programs are now in the hot seat. Many companies are wondering about the interest for such programs. And managers themselves are challenging the core postulated of CRM : improving customer satisfaction and loyalty leads to higher profits for companies.
In such a context, the objective of this paper is to shed the light on key improvement areas for a better profitability of CRM programs.
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Chapters in Books
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This chapter deals with education of a particular category of companies' stakeholders: the customers. Many examples presented by the authors show that customer education is a novel and differentiating activity. Companies must wonder about the impact of customer education on customer performance. Companies should also address the question of the impact of customer education on corporate performance, specifically on satisfaction and loyalty. From an organisational point of view, customer education initiatives should be implemented conjointly by the marketing department and the human resources management department.
The chapter is divided into three sections. The first section deals with the marketing objectives of customer education. The authors describe the relationships between customer education, skills acquisition, product usage and customer loyalty. They stress the importance of communicating on these activities. The second section refers to implementation of customer education and describes the different stages from goals definition to customer education assessment. Specifically, the authors explain how to measure the impact of customer education. The last section depicts the interest and the limitations of information communication technologies as tools for customer education. Different issues are underlined, such as the adoption of these technologies by consumers.
In this chapter, the authors regularly stress the novelty of customer education and position it as a new challenge that HR managers have to address.
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Papers in Refereed Conference Proceedings
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In order to better understand capability and usability of products, an increasing number of consumers read user manuals at the pre-purchase stage. The objective of this exploratory research is (i) to understand the impact of reading user manual at the pre-purchase stage on product evaluation and purchase intention and (ii) to investigate mediating and moderating effects. In an experiment, we found that user manual exposure may positively influence product evaluation and purchase intention, as long as the perceived pedagogical quality of the manual is high. User manual evoked usage vividness and perceived customer education are mediating this effect.
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This research aims to better understand the effects of post‐purchase customer education on the skills, usage behavior and satisfaction of consumers. To this effect, a structural model was designed. It highlights the important role played by the improvement of consumers’ skills on satisfaction. It also shows that the variety and frequency of product usage are positively influenced by customers’ skills, but that usage intensity does not necessarily affect customer atisfaction. Finally, the effects of customer education on satisfaction are moderated by ustomer product category expertise
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This paper deals with the importance of customer education as a new competitive advantage strategy related to providing personalized and customized services. Customer education is part of a Customer Relationship Management philosophy where it’s used as a public relations and promotional tool to retain customers and gain their trust by persuading them to buy the products after differentiating and emphasizing the values added aspects of their products.
Providing the best quality at the best price can no longer be considered as a competitive strategy in a fierce competitive environment. This paper will discuss the different methods adopted by worldwide companies to educate their customers such as the use of e-learning, in-house seminars, newsletters, websites, and exhibitions, in addition to identifying the best practices used by those companies and the key to successful customer education strategy.
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E-learning has been recently proposed as a tool for prospecting and developing consumer loyalty, by the e-commerce sites that are eager to provide their customers with a value-added supplementary ser-vice.
This article explores this new approach through the example of on line brokers in France. An investi-gation of major French brokers shows that all provide this service but in a rudimentary manner both in terms of the content and in the learning process. Moreover none of them can yet really measure the efficiency of this service in terms of learning or improving customer relationship.
For the future, it seems interesting to use the synergy of research in distance learning and services marketing to study the efficiency of this tool.
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Professional Press
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This Special Issue of Business Leadership Review is dedicated to selected articles which have been presented to the 3rd Annual DBA Research Symposium held in Grenoble on February 2nd & 3rd 2011 with the Association of MBAs and Grenoble Ecole de Management. About forty delegates attended the Symposium and 17 DBA researchers from accredited DBA programmes presented their research.
This year’s theme was: Achieving Personal and Professional Development. There is a broad range of potential personal objectives for DBA students: the development of their expertise in their domain in order to boost their career, or the inflexion toward new jobs like teaching and consulting, up to a drastic change in their professional career. Having a clear personal objective while undertaking a DBA is a key success factor, particularly with regards to motivation.
When designing their research students have to streamline their past experience with their future objective. The past experience is often the source of knowledge on which the doctoral student relies for choosing his/her research question. But taking into account future objectives in the design of the research is far more difficult, particularly when drastic changes in professional orientation are looked for.
A survey conducted among former DBA researchers prior to the Symposium illustrates this issue: two thirds mentioned that their initial motivation when undertaking their DBA was to combine both academic and professional careers. A very large majority, over 90%, confirmed that the DBA helped them to be more satisfied with their jobs. They achieved better recognition (96%), a greater efficiency in their job (90%) and a better position in their organisation (71%). For two thirds of them, it helped them to find a new job.
So the DBA is effectively contributing to the achievement of personal and professional development. Discussion during the Symposium showed that the success was in particular due to the capability of t
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Consumer Education and Training
Customer Relations Management
Consumer Behavior
(Grenoble Graduate School of Business)
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