An Academic Look at Insights

Interview conducted by Ideas To Go Chairman Ed Harrington on April 11, 2013

Ideation Session Generates Proposals for a More Integrated Yale

Strategic Marketing Leadership: The Role of a Chief Marketing Officer was first offered in the spring 2012 semester. It aims to give students a complete view of the CMO role. Co-taught by Ravi Dhar, the George Rogers Clark Professor of Management and Marketing and director of the Yale Center for Customer Insights (YCCI), and Arun Sinha, senior faculty fellow and YCCI executive-in-residence, the course offers what Sinha calls the "C-suite perspective"—the overarching, holistic understanding of an organization that a top executive needs.

The course reflects the spirit of Yale SOM's integrated curriculum by crossing interdisciplinary boundaries to provide a more complex view of the challenges organizations face. Weekly guest speakers, drawn from a spectrum of sectors, address big questions in marketing, citing real-life examples from their workplaces. Sinha and Dhar then lead in-depth discussions of each topic.

See five CMOs from a spectrum of sectors discuss how they address big questions in marketing.  Watch the video:

Now, finally, we know why sea hamburgers taste better than crab cakes.

Most of us can relate to the feelings of excitement and anticipation that comes along with eying a beautifully wrapped gift with our name on it. Unfortunately, most of us can also relate to the disappointment of opening such a present only to discover socks, long underwear or even a fruitcake waiting inside.

Economists and marketers have long assumed that potential customers rationally weigh the costs and benefits of every possible choice before deciding what to buy. Under this assumption, marketers use tidy frameworks to help identify ways to influence consumer decisions.

As it turns out, this assumption is wrong. While shopping, we don't think as much as we think we think.

The Center for Customer Insights hosted Claire Hughes Johnson, VP of New Products, Media and Platforms at Google, this past February at our Higher Velocity Marketplace conference. 

She gave an insightful and entertaining talk titled The Acceleration of Everything, about how rapidly the ways to connect with, and learn about, consumers are changing, with vast amounts of data being collected every second.  How marketers use this data can help them to "be found, be relevent, and be engaging" to their consumers...because consumers are leading the way!

Remember the time you bought your first iPod? Was the decision influenced by a TV ad? Or did someone you trust, perhaps a technology enthusiast, gave you unsolicited advice and perhaps a quick demo? Did the same happen with a Kindle when it first came out? How fast was the progression from awareness to consideration to purchase to loyalty?

Suppose you are an executive in charge of marketing decisions for your firm.  Your R&D people have developed a new product, and you need to decide what price to charge. Do you feel confident predicting what people will pay?  Shane Frederick, a professor at Yale School of Management, is confident you’ll overestimate how much the typical person will pay – and overestimate it by a lot.

In an episode of the popular sitcom Seinfeld, George thinks he has purchased a car that once belonged to the actor Jon Voight. In every conversation he finds a way to drop in the name and basks in the reflected glory and people are very impressed with him and his car. Inevitably, at the end of the episode, it is discovered that the car indeed had an owner called Voight (first name John), who was most certainly not the famous actor. At this point George is utterly disgusted with the very same car that gave him so much pleasure and pride just a little while back. 

Why would this be? Why indeed would people buy objects once owned by celebrities? This question was examined by another George (George Newman, assistant professor of organizational behavior at Yale School of Management), along with his Yale colleague Paul Bloom and Gil Diesendruck  of Bar-Ilan University, Israel. 

 It sounds counter-intuitive. A big studio movie, especially one based on a popular Disney ride, would have been expected to be advertised to saturation point. And perhaps it was, as far as the theatrical release goes. But we know that movie revenue is not limited to just movie theatres; it includes secondary sources such as DVD sales. In fact, the term "secondary" could be inappropriate, as DVD revenue through sales and rentals was more than twice box office revenue in 2008. Given that dynamic, how should movie studios advertise their DVD releases in order to maximize profit? Especially when they have no idea how their movie is going to perform in the market?

An estimated 2 billion people around the world watched the modern day fairy tale wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton. The sumptuous ceremonies were telecast live in many countries around the world. While the British Royalty was displayed in full regalia, it may not have been as clear that the bride and groom had previously made an important choice.

It’s clear why shoppers like store brands. Private labels are cheaper than their name brand counterparts, and in categories where the store brand and name brand are virtually identical, buying private label is a way to save pennies without sacrificing too much. And during these recessionary times, those pennies are worth a lot to many consumers.

It seems too good to be a true: a costless way to get consumers to like your product more, to pay more for it, and to consume more of it that involves no changes to the product itself. However, a new working paper from Jong Ming Kim and Professor Nathan Novemsky of the Yale School of Management suggests that, at least for certain categories of products, this effect can be achieved just by having consumers rate a product on dimensions that are described using elegant language. For example, when people were asked to rate how velvety a wine was, they liked it considerably more than when they were asked to rate how smooth a wine was, even though both groups rated the same wine.

New Haven, Conn., September 9, 2008 - Whether deciding to buy a new iPhone or a new car, consumers often do not consider that the initial thrill of a new purchase will wear off over time, according to new research from the Yale Center for Customer Insights at the Yale School of Management.