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Icosystem wins Best Paper Award at 2007 WOMMA conference
Icosystem Corporation Press Release
Cambridge, MA - 30 October 2007
Icosystem Corporation was announced today to be the recipient of a Best Paper Award for the 2007 Research Symposium of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA).
The paper, titled How Word-of-Mouth Impacts Medicare
Product Launch and Product Design and authored by
Paolo Gaudiano, Oliver Bandte, Dejan Duzevik and Andrey Anev, describes a case study in which Icosystem helped Humana Corporation with marketing and product design for the launch of new Medicare products beginning in January of 2006.
The paper was selected by WOMMA for Best Discussion of Lessons Learned.
The abstract of the paper is provided below. For a full version of the paper please contact us at  .
Abstract
We have developed a software simulation platform for marketing strategy and planning. The platform enables marketers to understand how word-of-mouth (WOM), social networks and other types of consumer interactions all influence the outcome of any marketing initiative across traditional and non-traditional channels.
In 2005 we began working with Humana’s Senior Products group to help them plan their marketing strategy for new product launches that were planned for 2006, when Medicare plans were mandated by law to begin including prescription drug coverage. Our tool helped Humana make a number of important predictions and it elucidated key aspects of how WOM would impact the outcome of their marketing initiatives.
One year after the launch of the new Medicare plans, Humana had moved from sixth largest to second largest provider of Medicare plans in the United States.
An additional benefit of our simulation technology is that it can also be used to understand many aspects of what motivates consumer behavior – not simply the response to advertising and WOMUnits. Realizing this, we have been working with Humana to create a version of the same software platform that is being used by product managers to help them design better offerings.
In this paper we explain why WOM should be treated as an integral part of marketing strategy, we outline our approach, we describe the specific problem we had to solve, we describe our implementation of the software simulation platform, and we report our findings and results from the launch of new Medicare plans.
About Icosystem Corporation
Icosystem Corporation, a strategy consulting
firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has emerged as a leader in the
development of business applications for network theory and complexity
science. Using the tools of complexity science and advanced
computational techniques, Icosystem provides a highly flexible and
cost-effective technology platform for exploring business problems and
discovering or designing strategies that have significant impact.
Icosystem's approach uses realistic models of complex business
environments and evolutionary and distributed computational techniques
to validate new business ventures or improve the performance of
existing enterprises.
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