Professor Keeps Eye on Research

A lot can happen in 100 milliseconds. Research from Michel Wedel at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business shows that people may glance at online ads and look away in less than a blink.

Advertisers who want to hold people’s attention a bit longer should consider straightforward messages with simple images. The study, which relies on eye-tracking technology at Maryland Smith's Behavioral Laboratory, is part of a body of work that has earned Wedel numerous career achievement awards.

Most recently, he received the 2019 Irwin/McGraw-Hill Distinguished Marketing Educator Award from the American Marketing Association. Only 35 educators have received the award since the inaugural presentation in 1985, placing Wedel in elite company.

Despite his success in marketing research, Wedel started down a different path in the Netherlands, where he was born and raised. After earning degrees in biomathematics, business and statistics in the 1980s, he went to work at a nutrition research institute in The Hague.

That’s where a boss asked him to do marketing research to determine how people choose the food they eat. “A few years and a few publications later, he urged me to do a PhD,” Wedel says. 

By this point, Wedel had developed a passion for marketing. So he enrolled in a program at the nearby University of Wageningen, and earned a PhD in marketing while continuing his work at the nutrition institute. “I was struck by the breadth of questions, data and methodologies in marketing,” he says.

Over time, Wedel became increasingly interested in assessing the effectiveness of visual marketing using eye-tracking technology. He also studies targeted advertising, which relies on consumer data from social media and other digital sources.

Wedel says the explosion of available consumer data has transformed marketing.

“When I became a full professor at the University of Groningen in 1991, there was no internet,” he says. “Cordless phones were just becoming more common, the 486 computer was at the cutting edge of computing technology, and scanner panel data that tracked household purchases over time were a novelty.”

Now, through online and mobile applications, companies routinely capture digital information on how consumers feel, act and interact around products and services and how they respond to marketing efforts. “Mostly because of the work at business schools, the development of analytical techniques has kept pace and allows such data to be leveraged to build and maintain customer relationships,” Wedel says.

Ultimately, he says, marketing is about improving relationships between buyers and sellers. “Marketing facilitates exchange relationships,” he says. “It uses insights into customer needs to make those more efficient, effective and valuable.”

Wedel, who came to Smith in 2006, serves as Distinguished University Professor and PepsiCo Chair in Consumer Science.

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