Peter Fader

Peter Fader is the Frances and Pei-Yuan Chia Professor of Marketing at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He is also the academic Co-Director of the Wharton Customer Analytics Initiative, an academic research center focused on the development and application of customer analytic methods.

Fader's research is based on the analysis of behavioral data to understand and forecast customer shopping and purchasing activities. He works with firms from a wide range of industries, such as consumer packaged goods, interactive media, financial services, and pharmaceuticals.

Many of these cross-industry experiences led to the development of the Wharton Customer Analytics Initiative, a research center launched in 2011 that serves as a matchmaker between academic researchers and companies that depend on granular, customer-level data for strategic decisions. WCAI is an expansion of Fader's earlier research center, the Wharton Interactive Media Initiative, which dealt with issues related to interactive media and its impact on broader business matters. For example, one of WIMI's projects involved partnering with ESPN to develop a predictive model to project multichannel media consumption across Internet and mobile platforms.

Fader's work has been published in a number of leading journals in marketing, statistics, and the management sciences, and he serves on the editorial boards of many of them. He has also won many awards for his teaching and research accomplishments. In 2009, Fader was named a "Professor to Watch" by the Financial Times, which discussed his interest in "the swathes of hard data consumers generate through their spending habits."

Professor Fader is the author of the book, Customer Centricity: Focus on the Right Customers for Strategic Advantage'' (May 2012).

Outside of academia he is perhaps best known for his expert witness testimony at the Napster trial.

Professor Fader is also co-founder of Zodiac, a predictive analytics firm that aims to make top-notch customer valuation models and insights easily accessible to a broad array of data-driven organizations.