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 the Journal 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 the Journal 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.