Spotlight on Marketing

Marketing Impact Starts Here

The Smith School’s marketing department combines leading scholars who have had profound influence on the discipline with young scholars showing great promise and potential for impact. Faculty explore issues related to quantitative modeling, strategic marketing, and consumer behavior and are leaders in the nascent field of applying complexity theory to business problems. A uniquely collaborative and cross-functional environment brings faculty together to produce research published in the top journals in marketing as well as in other fields.

Smith’s marketing department has been the home of top marketing scholars for a number of years. Roland Rust, Distinguished University Professor and David Bruce Smith Chair of Marketing, has won the prestigious MSI-Paul Root award from theJournal of Marketing three times and is the holder of career awards in advertising, services marketing, marketing research, and statistics. Michel Wedel, Pepsico Professor of Consumer Science, recently received the American Marketing Association’s Gilbert A. Churchill Award for lifetime achievement in the academic study of marketing research. Department chair P.K. Kannan, professor of marketing and director of the Center for Excellence in Service, is also a prolific researcher whose partnerships with industry have resulted in award-winning and influential research.

Capitalizing on its faculty expertise in service, the marketing department has carved a unique niche as a world leader in customer equity management and service; it sponsors the Center for Excellence in Service and its annual Frontiers in Service Conference as well as the Journal of Service Research. Two of the leaders of the Smith School’s new Center for Complexity in Business, Executive Director Roland Rust and Research Director William Rand, are part of the marketing department. The Center for Complexity in Business promotes the interdisciplinary study of large groups of interacting, heterogeneous, autonomous entities operating in dynamic, rich, and temporal environments.

Innovations in the classroom have also brought greater intellectual capital to the learning environment at Smith. Over the last few years, the marketing department has focused its educational mission on data-driven decision making, encouraging the development of such skills in all MBA courses. Students learn to integrate marketing theory and analytical tools, applying analysis of real data to make strategic decisions in a theoretically and analytically sound manner. In addition to extensive course offerings at the MBA and undergraduate levels, the department offers a vibrant Ph.D. program, consistently placing students at top institutions.

Significant contributions and breakthrough research were recognized with a shower of accolades last semester. In addition to the honors garnered by P.K. Kannan, Michael Trusov and Roland Rust, the following faculty were also honored:

Wendy Moe, associate professor of marketing, received the 2010 American Marketing Association (AMA) Erin Anderson Award for an Emerging Female Marketing Scholar and Mentor. The award is given annually at the AMA Winter Educators’ Conference to a female marketing professor who has made significant research contributions in terms of publications in leading journals and working papers under review as well as for teaching and service contributions to her department. Moe’s research interests include modeling online consumer shopping behavior and early sales forecasting. Her current research focuses on technology-enabled measures of early product success.

Jie Zhang, associate professor of marketing and Harvey Sanders Fellow of Retail Management, and Michel Wedel, Pepsico Professor of Consumer Science, published a paper titled “The Effectiveness of Customized Promotions in Online and Offline Stores” (Journal of Marketing Research April 2009). It was a finalist for the Paul Green Award for the article published in 2009 with the most potential to contribute significantly to the practice of marketing research.

Roland Rust, Distinguished University Professor, David Bruce Smith Chair in Marketing, Executive Director of Center for Excellence in Service , and Executive Director of Center for Complexity in Business, won the 2010 Sheth Foundation/Journal of Marketing Award honoring the article with the greatest long-term impact for "Return on Marketing: Using Customer Equity to Focus Marketing Strategy" (with Kay Lemon and Valarie Zeithaml). Valarie Zeithaml received her PhD from the Smith School.

Rust and Associate Professor Rebecca Hamilton's paper "Feature Fatigue: When Product Capabilities Become Too Much of a Good Thing," (2005) was a finalist for The O'Dell Award, given five years after publication to the paper published in theJournal of Marketing Research that has "made the most significant, long-term contribution to marketing theory, methodology, and/or practice." Their co-author Deborah Viana Thompson received her PhD from the Smith School.