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.
Smith School Celebrates Third INFORMS Marketing Science Fellow P. K. Kannan
P. K. Kannan, associate dean and marketing professor at the Smith School, was named a Fellow of the INFORMS Society for Marketing Science, honoring his decades of influential research, mentorship, and service in digital marketing, analytics, and marketing science.
Smith’s Jie Zhang and PhD Graduate Min Kim Earn Prestigious AMA Award
Smith professor Jie Zhang and PhD alum Min Kim won the AMA’s 2025 Don Lehmann Award for their Journal of Marketing Research article on predicting online shopping preferences in dynamic, large-scale retail assortments.
Moments of Impact
Smith faculty are shaping policy, business and society through influential research and public service. From AI and insurance reform to pay equity and public pensions, they’re winning top awards and earning national recognition for impact and innovation across disciplines.
ISSIP Honors Smith’s Roland Rust for ‘Advancing Service Innovation'
Smith’s Roland Rust has been named a 2025 ISSIP Fellow for pioneering contributions to service research, including founding key conferences and journals, and advancing AI scholarship in the field. He ranks among the world’s top 100 business research scientists.