Once Mr. Guillen, the Tesla Motors Ltd. manager in charge of readying the Model S for launch by July, gets some running room, he hits the electric car's accelerator.

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"It's just kind of a dying business model, " said Jeffrey Klingelhofer, a portfolio manager at Thornburg Investment Management.

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The media-modeling tool was kicked into high gear two years ago when Chad Jacoby, senior manager of Nissan's Business Intelligence Unit, used years of Nissan's consumer research to build a computer model comparing the relationship of each phase of their "purchase funnel"--from awareness to purchase consideration to a transaction--to the phase before it.

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