What's Next! With Tiffani Bova

Today’s guest is Peter Fader, professor of marketing at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania and the co-founder of Zodiak. His expertise centers on the analysis of behavioral data to understand and forecast customer shopping purchasing activities. His insights are reflected in his great book, Customer Centricity. The highlight of the conversation is Peter’s story of his disagreement with Wall Street’s findings on Dish Network’s company valuations. Peter and his team analyzed the company valuations using the public data Dish provided to investors. They came up with company valuations that were within 3-5% difference of the forecasts Wall Street was making. Next, as a fun academic exercise, his students created forecasts for the next 4 quarters using various statistical methods. Peter compared his students’ numbers to Dish’s quarterly numbers and noticed two things: (1) the students were within .5% of the number that Dish announced, and (2) the Wall Street analysts were off by about