"Marketing Profit Impact: Quantifying Online and Offline Funnel Progression at Inofec"by Thorsten Wiesel of the University of Groningen, Koen Pauwels of Ozyegin University and Joep Arts of VU University.  Inofec, an SME producer of office furnishings, desired a more analytic approach to allocate marketing resources across communication activities and channels. They developed a conceptual framework and econometric model to empirically investigate (1) the marketing communication effects on offline and online purchase funnel metrics and (2) the magnitude and timing of the profit impact of firm-initiated and customer-initiated contacts. They found many cross-channel effects, in particular offline marketing effects on online funnel metrics and online funnel metrics on offline purchases. Moreover, marketing communication activities directly affected both early and later purchase funnel stages (website visits, online and offline information and quote requests). They also found that online customer-initiated contacts have substantially higher profit impact than offline firm-initiated contacts. The reallocation of marketing resources based on these findings yielded a fourteen-fold increase in net net profit compared to the status-quo allocation.