Holiday shopping season is about to enter full swing and retailers are doing their best to lure customers. With a little comparison-shopping, consumers can score some great deals.   In this edition of Smith Business Close-Up with the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business, host Jeff Salkin sits down with Janet Wagner to talk about this season’s holiday retail outlook.

A Smith doctoral candidate’s recent findings that guide marketers to focus beyond an online customer’s “last click” have drawn prestigious recognition from the Marketing Science Institute (MSI). 

According to the American Marketing Association, the world’s most productive marketing researchers over the past five years include Smith School professors Michael Trusov, Michel Wedel and Jie Zhang. The trio ranks among the top 50 “most productive researchers” for 2009-13 in the AMA’s DocSig Author Research Productivity listings. 

First it was The New York Times. Then The Baltimore Sun. Now The Washington Post has followed suit, requiring online readers to buy a subscription.

If you’ve got it, don’t flaunt it. That’s the conclusion Smith School researchers came to when they studied how people display the brands they use.  According to the study, people boasting the brands they use in a conspicuous manner – such as name-dropping their designer handbag label or wearing Gucci sunglass indoors – is a turn-off for many others.

Decision makers in public and private sectors should be paying attention to and leveraging chatter on a platform like Twitter to better connect and resonate with the masses. At the Smith School’s Center for Complexity in Business (CCB) Conference from Nov. 7 to 8 at the Ronald Reagan Building, experts from academia and industry discussed methods for investigating and disseminating social media content.  

The Eyes Have It It’s not often that a lecture on advertising effectiveness begins with a primer on biology. But for Michel Wedel, Pepsico Professor of Consumer Science, learning about how customers respond to ads begins with learning how a customer actually sees.

COLLEGE PARK, Md. - Amna Kirmani, professor of marketing for the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business, has been elected to serve as president the Association of Consumer Research, effective Jan. 1, 2014. Kirmani, director of Smith’s PhD Programs, will guide the 1,700-member association and its mission to advance consumer research and facilitate the exchange of scholarly information among members of academia, industry and government worldwide.

Air dates: Thursday, September 12, 2013, 7:30 p.m.; Sunday, September 15, 2013, 7:30 a.m. Twitter, Facebook, discussion blogs, review sites – consumers are out there talking about businesses and products, and those business should be paying attention. How can marketers monitor these online conversations use it to their advantage?

College Park, Md. – September 12, 2013 – Michel Wedel, the Pepsico Professor of Consumer Science at the Robert H. Smith School of Business, was named a 2013-2014 Distinguished Scholar-Teacher by the University of Maryland.