SMITH BRAIN TRUST – How should the National Football League respond to a pro-Trump political action committee's "Turn Off the NFL" boycott? "The league needs to grab this ball and run it up the field," says Henry C. Boyd III, marketing professor at the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business.

SMITH BRAIN TRUST – It's not "game over" for Toys 'R' Us. Its filing for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection this week is more of a "timeout." And Jie Zhang, professor of marketing at the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business, says that if the iconic toy retailer plays its cards right, it could end up a winner. Of course, none of that will be easy, says Zhang, the Harvey Sanders Fellow of Retail Management.

SMITH BRAIN TRUST – You can recognize that iconic, bright yellow Cheerios box in an instant. But a U.S. trademark court says that's not reason enough to grant the cereal maker exclusive claims to the color.

SMITH BRAIN TRUST – Glance down to send a text and you could miss one: Fox Sports is rolling out new 6-second television commercials for the start of the NFL season. The move to exceptionally short ad spots comes after the network saw a dip in viewership last season, to 16.5 million, from 17.9 million the season before. But the move is likely about much more than ratings, says Michel Wedel, the PepsiCo Chair in Consum

SMITH BRAIN TRUST – As our social lives increasingly flow from the real world to the online world, does it logically follow that, eventually, our shopping habits will flow that way as well? Or are our online social pursuits likely to make us too busy to spend time on shopping?

SMITH BRAIN TRUST – Soon, it might be that your favorite place to shop is in your mailbox.

SMITH BRAIN TRUST – Does food actually taste worse when we're dining alone? Recent research suggests solitude negatively affects our enjoyment of food, but finds we can counter the effect by positioning a mirror or a photo of ourselves where we can see it. The findings, from researchers at Japan's Nagoya University, will be published in a forthcoming edition of the journal Physiology

SMITH BRAIN TRUST – Football season hasn't even started and already the National Football League is tackling some difficult challenges. It's coming off a season that saw an 8 percent decline in television viewership and now is faced with startling new evidence about the serious medical risks its players face.

Amna Kirmani, the Ralph J. Tyser Professor of Marketing at the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business, has been selected as one of three co-editors of the Journal of Consumer Research. Her editorship begins in January 2018 following the completion of her appointment as editor of the Journal of Consumer Psychology.

Research into data analytics by marketing professors Michel Wedel and P.K. Kannan at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business has captured the MSI H.