At Rice Business, the Center for Customer-Based Execution and Strategy — better known as C-CUBES — helps scholars excel in rigorous, peer-reviewed research focused on customer-based strategy.
Led by Vikas Mittal, faculty director and the J. Hugh Liedtke Professor of Marketing, the center’s focus is turning research into real-world impact. Whether it’s a Fortune 500 company or a nonprofit, C-CUBES shares insights that help organizations improve customer value, boost employee engagement and drive stronger returns for shareholders.
“Too often, traditional strategic planning misses that mark,” Mittal said. “It ignores customers and employees and doesn’t tie clearly to financial performance. C-CUBES is out to change that. We want to rethink how strategy is planned and executed and put the customer at the heart of the process. Customer value is the driver, not a consequence of successful strategy.”
Mittal has published extensively on strategy and decision-making in outlets such as Harvard Business Review, MIT-Sloan Management Review, Organization Studies, Organization Science, Journal of Psychiatry, Management Science, Journal of Marketing Research, Marketing Science and Advances in Skin and Wound Care. He is a past editor of the Journal of Marketing and Journal of Marketing Research.
C-CUBES’s 2025 Customer Value Report, based on a nationwide survey of 3,000 U.S. residents, is a powerful resource for scholars, business leaders, consumer advocates and regulators to better understand what people really value today.
C-CUBES hosts events for senior leaders in both the business and nonprofit worlds, creating spaces where research meets real-world experience. Ultimately, the center seeks to reimagine strategy planning and execution in organizations at large.
“We’re proud to be a hub for talented scholars in fields like accounting, strategy, marketing, organizational behavior, finance and operations — sectors that are integral to Rice Business’ curriculum and expertise,” Mittal said. “And thanks to our home in Houston and our strong connections in industries like energy, health care, education and tech, we’re helping turn academic insight into meaningful community impact.”
Now, C-CUBES has created the Outstanding Impact Award for Research on Customer-Based Strategy and Implementation. The award is given to a published, peer-reviewed article that uses rigorous research to exemplify the mission of delivering research with insights focused on customer-based strategy. The selection committee this year included academics from Rice Business as well as Babson College and the University of Sydney Business School.
This year’s winner is “Stakeholder engagement strategies, national institutions and firm performance: A configurational perspective,” published in Strategic Management Journal in 2020 by Kamini Gupta, Donal Crilly and Thomas Greckhamer. Their findings show that the engagement strategies associated with high performance vary according to local institutional context and company characteristics.
Honorable mentions:
The award will be given at the 2025 Rice Customer Based Strategy Symposium held Nov. 18 at the Ion, Houston’s innovation hub powered by Rice. Since 2010, Rice Business has hosted the symposium as a forum for sharing cutting-edge ideas in customer-based strategies with academic research, industry trends, insights from CEOs and conversations with senior executives.
To learn more about C-CUBES and other research initiatives from Rice Business, visit here.
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