Peter 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 telecommunications, financial services, gaming/entertainment, 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.
In addition to his various roles and responsibilities at Wharton, Professor Fader co-founded a predictive analytics firm (Zodiac) in 2015, which was sold to Nike in 2018. He then co-founded (and continues to run) Theta to commercialize his more recent work on “customer-based corporate valuation.”
Beyond his focus on customer-oriented activities, Professor Fader has expanded his interests in “quantifying the qualitative” to include employee assessment/management as well. He recently co-founded Incompass Labs to popularize an innovative “incentive-compatible peer assessment system” to bring the same kind of rigor and accountability to human resources that he has brought to marketing for many years.
Fader is the author of three books: “Customer Centricity: Focus on the Right Customers for Strategic Advantage” (2020), “The Customer Centricity Playbook” with Sarah Toms (2018), and “The Customer-Base Audit” with Bruce Hardie and Michael Ross (2022).
He has won many awards for his research and teaching accomplishments. Among these achievements, he was named by Advertising Age as one of its inaugural “25 Marketing Technology Trailblazers” in 2017 (and was the only academic on the list).
