6:00 - 8:00 pm
Bespoke, 266 College Street, New Haven
GM Room, 55 Hillhouse Ave., New Haven
7:45 - 8:15 am
8:15 – 8:30 am
Sharon Oster, Dean and Frederic D. Wolfe Professor of Management and Entrepreneurship, Yale School of Management
Ravi Dhar, George Rogers Clark Professor of Management and Marketing & Director of the Center for Customer Insights
Chair: Tom O'Guinn, Professor of Marketing, Wisconsin School of Business
8:30 – 8:55 am
Tom O'Guinn, Professor of Marketing and Erika Paulson, doctoral student, Wisconsin School of Business, University of Wisconsin-Madison
For decades brand thought has been dominated by psychological formulations. While useful, over-reliance on these theories has left researchers and practitioners with a major deficit: a poor understanding of the social nature of brands. While the changing media landscape has made this need more salient, it has always been there. This paper illustrates the value of a sociological model of brands. It offers several illustrations from our research, including the use of social disruption, political forces and collectives to advance brand goals and shape meaning.
8:55 - 9:20 am
Melanie Wallendorf, Soldwedel Professor of Marketing, Eller College of Management, University of Arizona and David Crockett, Associate Professor, The Moore School of Business, University of South Carolina
We draw from ethnographic data assembled during an intentional, extended engagement away from home to comment on product and brand uses and meanings. We unpack what consumers pack for encounters away from home, outside their normal brand routines, what the “stuff” is intended to accomplish, and how reflections on what is not included constitute an ideology of consumption seldom articulated in day to day life. In particular, our research uncovers brand meanings seldom articulated in studies of single brands used near home.
9:20 – 9:45 am
Ron Carroll, Global Director, Brand Integration, Young & Rubicam
Transforming a Global Brand: News from the Front
Two decades after revolutionizing the computer retail business with its direct-to-consumer, build-on-demand business model, Dell realized it needed to transform perceptions of its brand in order to accelerate its next big leap into enterprise IT solutions and services. This is the story of how Dell has approached its brand transformation, now two years in the making, and successes and learning along the way.
9:45 – 10:00 am
Chair: Olivier Toubia, Associate Professor of Marketing, Columbia Business School
10:00 - 10:23 am
Olivier Toubia, Associate Professor of Marketing, Columbia Business School and Andrew Stephen, Assistant Professor of Marketing, INSEAD
Why do people contribute content to Twitter?
In this research we study the motivations of consumers to contribute content in social networks such as Twitter. In particular, we focus on the null hypothesis that users derive most of their utility from broadcasting information to their followers, and consider the alternative motivation of contributing in order to acquire followers for status-enhancing purposes. These two hypotheses make different predictions regarding the impact of an increase in a user’s number of followers and that user’s posting activity. In order to test these hypotheses, we run an experiment in which we manipulate the number of followers of a set of target users by creating links to these users from a set of artificial users.
10:23 - 10:45 am
John Deighton, Harold M. Brierley Professor of Business Administration and Leora Kornfeld, Research Associate, Harvard Business School
Social media, online search, and advertising networks are enabling a digital reinvention of the magazine rack. Huffington Post, Gawker, Demand Media, Glam Media, and Cheezburger are all variations on the theme of real-time reader-led journalism. Editors use tools to show which keywords are being entered into search engines and content is generated to meet demand. If an editor sees a particular keyword driving traffic to a story, the story is re-edited to emphasize the keyword. Traffic is nudged across networks of content sites. If, as Forrester has argued, “We are all media companies now,” then studying how these firms run their operations may have value to any corporation who cares about being found online.
10:45 – 11:07 am
David Berkowitz, Senior Director of Emerging Media & Innovation, 360i
Social Media Strategies that Work
David will discuss some of the lessons garnered in his role of spearheading social marketing strategy at 360i. The company’s clients include Coca Cola, Oreo, JCPenney, and the Bravo Network.
11:07 – 11:30 am
Dina Mayzlin, Associate Professor and Yaniv Dover, Post-doctoral Fellow, Yale School of Management
While reviews are clearly popular and impactful, there have always been concerns about the authenticity of reviews since firms can manufacture positive reviews for their products. Here we propose an empirical method for detecting the existence of manipulation of reviews that differs from current work and apply this method to investigate under which conditions we expect to see the greatest amount of manipulation. In particular, we show that the amount of competition affects the rate of the manipulation behavior as well as the dynamics of the manipulation process.
11:30 am-1:00 pm
Chair: Connie Weaver, Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer, TIAA-CREF
1:00-1:02 pm
1:02-2:30 pm
John Copeland, Senior Expert, Consumer and Shopper Insights Practice, McKinsey & Company
Transforming Consumer Insight Capabilities for Superior Market Impact
Increasingly, business leaders are trying to get "closer to the consumer" and identify how to craft products, services and brands that will increase loyalty and profitability. However, many of these same leaders feel they are not getting what they need from their existing internal consumer insights organizations. This presentation will highlight the five areas critical to ensuring the development and delivery of world-class consumer insights to the organization.
Amanda Kelly, Director, Customer Insight and Innovation Center, Unilever
From selling to serving the shopper
This will review how shifting our mindset from sales to solutions unlocks new growth opportunities for Brands and for Retailers. The presentation includes US and global examples of moving from traditional in-and -out promotions into longer lasting offers that meet shopper needs -- which in turn benefits brands and retailers.
Jim Figura, VP, Global Consumer Insights and Henryka Komanska, Associate Director, Strategic Insights & Analytics, Home Care, Colgate Palmolive
Keeping a Steady Flow of Product Innovations
Keeping a steady flow of product innovations is a must for CPG companies like Colgate Palmolive - it keeps our products on the store shelves and in consumers' homes. To deliver a balanced pipeline of innovations, both big and small, in a sustainable way, CP had to rethink its research process. In this presentation we will describe our approach to rethinking research process to improve quality and reduce cycle time of getting products to market and share our experiences from the initial stages of its implementation.
Connie Weaver, Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer, TIAA-CREF
Insights Driving Transformation to Customer Focus
Whether it is serving the retirement plan needs of a large academic institution or providing investment advice to millions of consumers across America, TIAA-CREF has leveraged customer insights to help transform both their go-to-market strategy, as well as the 93-year-old firm's employee culture. This presentation will showcase how customer insights can help inform a strategic segmentation strategy and create a more customer-focused organization.
2:30 – 2:45 pm
Chair: John Hauser, Kirin Professor of Marketing, Sloan School of Management, MIT
2:45 – 3:08 pm
Louis Kim, Vice President, Advanced Platforms Group, Hewlett-Packard
From a product marketer’s perspective in a Fortune 10 company, how do concepts of innovation work in reality? What happens when grand visions go through established cultures and processes? How is great customer insight not enough in ensuring a winning product? Louis Kim, a worldwide product marketing director for HP’s consumer printing division will share his experiences and case studies championing design in various product roles across HP. Louis has worked in PCs, printing, handhelds, web services and software, in the US and in Europe.
3:08 – 3:30 pm
Renana Peres, Assistant Professor of Marketing, School of Business Administration, Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Ron Shachar, Visiting Professor, Fuqua School of Business, Duke University
The goal of this research is to explore the connection of brand characteristics and word-of-mouth, specifically we ask how do brand characteristics generate word of mouth. In order to identify the most relevant brand characteristics we build a theoretical framework for consumers’ stimulus to spread the word on brands. Our theoretical framework identifies three main sources of needs that can generate word of mouth: functional needs, such as the need for information, intrinsic emotional needs such as the need for excitement, and social needs such as social signaling of uniqueness. We then demonstrate how some fundamental brand characteristics (e.g. degree of differentiation) are mapped into these three needs.
3:30 – 3:52 pm
S. Sajeesh, Assistant Professor, Department of Marketing, Baruch College, City University of New York and Jagmohan Raju, Joseph J. Aresty Professor of Marketing, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania
Positioning and Pricing of Conspicuous Goods: A Competitive Analysis
Conspicuous consumption differs from mainstream consumption of regularly purchased goods as it satisfies not just material needs but also social needs. Our study extends the existing literature by formally recognizing that consumers are heterogeneous in their sensitivity to product exclusivity. We discuss the implications for product differentiation, price competition and firm profits in such markets. Our analysis cautions against the blanket use of marketing strategies intended to create an exclusive image for a product as price competition could be higher in such markets under some conditions.
3:52 - 4:15 pm
John Hauser, Kirin Professor of Marketing, Sloan School of Management, MIT and Matthew Selove, USC Marshall School of Business
The Strategic Importance of Accuracy in the Relative Quality of Conjoint Design
We explore the effects of over- and under-estimating uncertainty and heterogeneity theoretically and empirically. We demonstrate sufficient conditions (uncertainty and heterogeneity) for a unique interior pure-strategy Bertrand-Nash equilibria and we show when uncertainty leads firms to forego differentiation. We illustrate the phenomena empirically in a market for student apparel. High-design-quality and low-design-quality conjoint studies lead to different uncertainties, different heterogeneity estimates, and different strategic positions. Firms that rely on low-design-quality studies or ignore external-validity uncertainty make strategic errors and choose strategies that leave money on the table.
4:15 – 4:30 pm
4:30 – 4:52 pm
Noi Sian Koh, Doctoral Student, School of Information Sciences; Nan Hu, Assistant Professor, School of Information Sciences, and Srinivas K. Reddy, Professor of Marketing and Associate Dean, Lee Kong Chian School of Business, Singapore Management University
It is becoming clear that online customer reviews are playing an increasing role in influencing online sales of products. Here, we examine how consumers derive sentiment value from online reviews in making their purchase decisions. Our research (using data on over 50,000 books and 750,000 online reviews) shows that although ratings impact sales, the sentiments expressed in the review exert a greater influence. We also find a differential impact of strong and ordinary sentiments. Ordinary sentiments, both positive and negative are more influential in determining product sales than strong sentiments. This paper also sheds some insight on the relevance of rating and sentiments over different stages of the consumer decision making process. We find that ratings are important in the initial search and narrowing of choices while sentiments are important in the evaluation and final purchase.
4:52 – 5:15 pm
Monic Sun, Assistant Professor of Marketing, Stanford Graduate School of Business, Stanford University and Feng Zhu, Assistant Professor of Strategy, USC Marshall School of Business
Ad Revenue and Content Commercialization: Evidence from Blogs
Many scholars argue that content providers, when incentivized by ad revenue, are more likely to tailor their content to attract “eyeballs,” and as a result, popular content may be excessively supplied. We empirically test this prediction by taking advantage of the launch of an ad revenue-sharing program initiated by a major Chinese portal site in September 2007. Participating bloggers allow the site to run ads on their blogs and receive 50% of the revenue generated by these ads. After analyzing 4.4 million blog posts, we find that compared to nonparticipants, the percentage of popular content increases by about 13% on the participants’ blogs after the program takes effect. More than 50% of this increase can be attributed to topics shifting towards three domains: stock market, salacious content, and celebrities. We also find evidence that, relative to nonparticipants, the participants’ content quality increases after the program takes effect.
5:15 – 5:37 pm
Oded Netzer, Phillip H. Geier Jr. Associate Professor of Business, Marketing Division, Columbia Business School; Ronen Feldman, Associate Professor of Information Systems, School of Business Adminstration, Hebrew University of Jerusalem; Moshe Fresko, Digital Trowel; and Jacob Goldenberg, Professor of Marketing, School of Business Administration, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Mine Your Own Business: Market Structure Surveillance through Text Mining
Web 2.0 provides gathering places for internet users in blogs, forums, and chat-rooms. These gathering places leave footprints in the form of colossal amounts of data. These data include consumers’ thoughts, beliefs, experiences, and even interactions. In this paper, we propose an approach for firms to explore online user-generated content and “listen” to what customers write about the products in the category. Our objective is to convert the user generated content to market structure and competitive landscape insights.
5:37 - 6:00 pm
Jeffrey S. Larson, Assistant Professor of Business Management, Marriott School of Management, Brigham Young University and Ryan Hamilton, Assistant Professor of Marketing, Goizueta Business School, Emory University
When Budgeting Backfires: How Self-Imposed Price Restraints can Increase Spending
We propose that price restraints effectively partition the choice into a two-stage evaluation, one in which price and quality are evaluated independently instead of simultaneously. We propose that price restraints establish a range of “acceptable” prices, thereby increasing the importance of non-price, quality information for options within that range. The results are two-fold. First, consumers use quality to distinguish between options that are sufficiently close to the price restraint, resulting in a scaling effect: Consumers perceive larger quality differences between options. Second, quality differences are more important in deciding among this smaller, homogenized set, resulting in a weighting effect: Consumers weight quality more heavily relative to price when making their selections.
Union League Cafe, 1032 Chapel Street, New Haven
6:15-7:15 pm
7:15 - 10:15 pm
Keynote Address:
Arun Sinha, Group Chief Marketing Officer, Zurich Financial Services
Placing the Customer at the Heart of Everything We Do: Arun Sinha, Group Chief Marketing Officer at Zurich Financial Services, will talk about a global organization's journey to become customer centric. This presentation provides a deeper view on how the use of customer insights can transform a business, its brand and its people.
GM Room, 55 Hillhouse Ave., New Haven
8:00 - 8:30 am
Chair: Jan-Benedict Steenkamp, Knox Massey Distinguished Professor of Marketing and Area Chair of Marketing, UNC Kenan-Flagler
8:30 – 8:52 am
Sherif Nasser, Assistant Professor of Marketing; Danko Turcic, Assistant Professor of Operations Management; and Chakravarthi Narasimhan, Philip L. Siteman Professor of Marketing, Olin Business School, Washington University in St. Louis
National Label's Response to Store Brands: Throw in the Towel or Fight Back?
Store brands have grown over the years until, in 2009, they accounted for almost 90% of all new revenue in the packaged good category in the US. While this trend may benefit consumers and retailers, it poses a major challenge to national brand manufacturers. In this presentation, we provide strategic guidelines to manufacturers on how to best respond to store brand competition through repositioning and/or expanding their product lines depending on their competitive advantages vis-à-vis store brands.
8:52 – 9:15 am
Katrijn Gielens, Associate Professor of Marketing; and Jan-Benedict Steenkamp, Knox Massey Distinguished Professor of Marketing and Area Chair of Marketing, UNC Kenan-Flagler
New Products, the Antidote to Private Label Growth?
As national brands find it impossible to compete on price and increasingly difficult to compete on quality with private label products, the question therefore emerges to what extent brand manufacturers can truly fight private labels through expensive, rapidly imitated innovations and moreover, whether national brand innovation impacts national brand competitors differently than private label competitors. Next, how should the new product be positioned within the category on quality, features, and price? To address these questions, a study is carried out to evaluate the competitive effect of new products on metrics that are of paramount interest to the national brand manufacturer and the retailer, i.e. the rival national brands’ and private labels’ market share, using data on over 200 new CPG launches between 2003 and 2006 in the U.K.
9:15 – 9:37 am
Marco Bertini, Assistant Professor of Marketing, London Business School; Luc Wathieu, Visiting Associate Professor, McDonough School of Business, Georgetown University; and Sheena Iyengar, S. T. Lee Professor of Business, Columbia Business School
The Discriminating Consumer: Product Proliferation and Willingness to Pay for Quality
This paper provides evidence that consumers confronted with a proliferation of options will sharpen their appreciation of quality, making a switch to superior products more enticing and a switch to inferior products less tolerable. To explain this phenomenon we propose a theory of inferred sensitivity to quality differences. In the theory, the impact of quality on a consumer’s utility includes a known dispositional component (one’s personal taste for quality) and a situational component inferred from market equilibrium outcomes (the importance of quality in a market).
9:37 am – 10:00 am
Eric Anderson, Hartmarx Professor of Marketing, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University; Nir Jaimovich, Associate Professor, Duke University; and Duncan Simester, NTU Professor of Management Science, Sloan School of Management, MIT
Menu Costs and Price Rigidities: Micro Evidence
In this paper, we use a 55-month database of cost and price changes at a large retailer that allows us to document the impact of menu costs on pricing policy. The identification of menu costs stems from the retailer’s adoption of a “uniform pricing” rule that requires all variants of a product to have the same price. Differences in the number of variants across products lead to variation in the cost of changing the prices of these products. We show that the retailer is significantly less likely to raise prices following a cost increase on items that have more variants. Finally, we show that variation in consumer preferences partially explains why firms offer multiple product variants, which identifies a link between consumer heterogeneity and price stickiness.
10:00-10:15 am
Chair: Darren Dahl, Fred H. Siller Professor in Applied Marketing Research and Chair, Marketing Division, Sauder School of Business, University of British Columbia
10:15 – 10:38 am
Darren Dahl, Fred H. Siller Professor in Applied Marketing Research and Chair, Marketing Division, Sauder School of Business, University of British Columbia
The Role of Social Influence in Shaping Customer Choice
Customers are social creatures. The customer environment is filled with a variety of social influences that have significant impact on customer behavior. Utilizing experimental field study findings, we will highlight the role of both explicit and implicit social influence in shaping customer choice and behaviors. This discussion will provide insight into how employees and even other customers can act as social agents, influencing customer decision-making and consumption.
10:38 – 11:00 am
Punam Keller, Charles Henry Jones Third Century Professor of Management, Tuck School of Business, Dartmouth College; Bari Harlam, Senior Vice President, Marketing, CVS Caremark; George Lowenstein, Herbert A. Simon Professor of Economics and Psychology; and Kevin Volpp, Associate Professor of Medicine and Healthcare Management, the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania.
Enhanced Active Choice
We advance the concept of forced choice by testing three important enhancements. We provide conceptual and empirical evidence for regret aversion for the new opportunity expressed as a forced choice than as a default. Third, we examine a modified approach that we call “Enhanced Active Choice‟ that advantages the option preferred by the communicator by highlighting losses incumbent in the non-preferred alternative. We believe dislike for the non-preferred alternative will be more marked when the costs of non-compliance are highlighted in the choice format.
11:00 – 11:22 am
Milica Milosavljevic, Postdoctoral Researcher in Consumer Neuroscience, California Institute of Technology
How to Capture Consumer Attention: Insights from Neuroscience
Consumers are exposed to enormous amounts of information, yet their processing capacity is limited. While 11,000,000 bits of information reach consumers each second, they are capable of processing only around 50 bits of that information, letting most of the input go by unnoticed. How consumers attend to and perceive incoming information has a profound influence on their behavior. Combining insights from psychology, economics, and neuroscience offers a way of understanding this subtle yet powerful mechanism. In particular, much progress is being made in computer simulations of what consumers pay attention to during the first seconds of exposure to marketing materials.
11:22 am – 11:45 am
George Newman, Postdoctoral Associate in Marketing, Yale School of Management, Yale School of Management
The Valuation of Authentic Goods
Past research has documented the importance of brand authenticity across a number of different consumer domains. However, few studies have empirically examined the psychological determinants of brand authenticity. Building on theories of contagion, the present studies examine how authenticity may be transmitted to products through physical contact with “authentic sources.” The theoretical and practical implications of these findings for brand management are discussed.
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