The First Smith IBM Day Exposes Students to Consulting, Branding and Opportunity
The inaugural IBM Day at UMD’s Smith School of Business featured class takeovers, coffee chats, and networking. Alumni shared insights on AI, consulting, and martech careers. IBM highlighted SkillsBuild and partnerships, connecting coursework with real-world business and technology applications.
21 Smith School Professors Named Among Top 2% Scholars Worldwide
Twenty-one Smith School professors were named among the top 2% most cited researchers globally, according to Elsevier’s 2025 study across 22 fields. Representing both current and emeritus faculty, their impactful research advances business knowledge and global academic excellence.
Smith’s Rebecca Ratner Addresses Social Connection in ACR 2025 Leadership Role
Led by President Rebecca Ratner, the Association for Consumer Research held its 2025 conference in Washington, D.C., exploring “Buying and Beyond.” Ratner emphasized social connection in her address, highlighting research on loneliness, consumer behavior, and marketing’s role in fostering connection.
Pioneering Digital Marketing and Strategic Initiatives at Smith
P.K. Kannan, Dean’s Chair in Marketing Science at the Smith School, revolutionized digital marketing research and education. His award-winning work bridges technology and marketing, solving real business problems and shaping innovative programs like the Interdisciplinary Business Honors and Smith Business Leadership Fellows.
3 Keys to Big Tech’s Success that Your Company Can Implement Now
Bobby Zhou’s research highlights three strategies any company can use to grow like tech giants: open to third parties, connect customers, and reach customers’ customers. These platformization methods harness network effects, building defensible, scalable, and innovative businesses across industries.
Who’s Your Competition?
New research by P.K. Kannan, Dean’s Chair in Marketing Science at the Smith School, and Xian Gu, PhD ’19, applies CSIS to identify hotel competitors. Unlike traditional methods, CSIS efficiently pinpoints top rivals across diverse markets, revealing asymmetric influences, spatial variation, and broader applicability beyond hospitality.
Want a Review You Can Trust? Ask Someone Who Did It Alone.
People trust reviews of leisure activities more when they come from someone who did the activity alone, according to the Smith School’s Rebecca Ratner. Her research shows solo consumers are seen as more focused and credible, influencing recommendations significantly.
AI for Customer Journeys: A Transformer Approach
AI for Customer Journeys: A Transformer Approach
Zipei Lu and P. K. Kannan, Smith School of Business, University of Maryland
(forthcoming Journal of Marketing Research)
The Influential Solo Consumer: When Engaging in Activities Alone (vs. Accompanied) Increases the Impact of Recommendations
Information about the social context of consumption is often seen on review websites or social media when consumers sharing word-of-mouth about an experience indicate whether they engaged in the activity solo or with companions. Across a secondary dataset scraped from Tripadvisor.com, five main experiments, and one supplemental experiment, the current research finds that individuals who engage in consumption activities alone can be a more influential source of recommendations than people who engage in these same activities with others.
AI for Customer Journeys: A Transformer Approach
Marketing researchers at the Smith School developed a transformer-based AI model that predicts digital customer behavior, personalizes insights, and outperforms traditional methods—advancing real-time marketing analytics and ROI through individualized, multi-touchpoint journey analysis.