University of Maryland Business School Professor Wins Top Marketing Award

College Park, Md. – June 24, 2008 – P.K. Kannan, Harvey Sanders Associate Professor of Marketing at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business, has won the John D.C. Little Award for co-authoring the paper "New Product Development Under Channel Acceptance," published in the March/April issue of Marketing Science. Kannan and his co-authors accepted the annually awarded prize and highest honor given by the College on Marketing of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) at the Marketing Science Conference on June 13. The prestigious award is given for the best paper published in either the Marketing Science or Management Sciencejournals and is named after John D.C. Little, a professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management who is widely recognized as a founder of marketing science.

Kannan’s research is significant because it gives manufacturers the framework for designing new products that will ensure they will get on the shelves of critical big-box retailers such as Wal-Mart and Home Depot. It establishes a decision-support system by which manufacturers can anticipate the needs and wants of both the end-user consumer and the big-box retailers. Kannan and co-authors Lan Luo, a Smith PhD graduate now at the University of Southern California, and Brian Ratchford of the University of Texas at Dallas, are the first researchers to successfully tackle the issue.

"P.K.’s work is significant because it offers industry-changing implications," said Howard Frank, dean of the Robert H. Smith School of Business. "I’m pleased that Smith School faculty continue to be recognized for their contributions in shaping emerging business management thought leadership and best practices."

"The strength of dominant retailers has really become a huge issue for manufacturers," said Kannan. "If you design a product that meets the needs of your consumer, it won’t matter if it never gets into their hands. First you have to sell it to the big box retailers, and the competition for shelf space is very tight. So a manufacturer’s optimal new product could be different when it is strategic with respect to the retailer as compared to considering only consumer preferences."

Kannan partnered with Shapour Azarm, professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Maryland’s A. James Clark School of Engineering on the initial grant proposal for the project, receiving a $450,000 National Science Foundation grant. Black & Decker kicked in a third of the grant funds and the researchers studied the design and marketing process for one of the manufacturer’s hand-held power tools.