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 MBAs with a Mission by Brook Raflo Thinking inside the Box by Nicholas Shreiber, Guest Columnist - - - - - - - - - - - - - -  Online Feedback Form Tell us what you think about Goizueta Magazine |
Marketing Strategy Unplugged (cont.) Page 3 Srivastava began his marketing research career twenty-two years ago with the same kind of model building and statistical analysis as Menon and Bharadwaj, but in the last decade he has turned to the question of how to utilize those models to make good strategy decisions. He cautions that using established models and old data can produce overly past-oriented thinking. "When you start looking at marketing strategies, you have to have a vision of the future. Right now, I am trying to develop a model called 'Driving the Future.' The idea is that the future doesn't have to be something the world dictates to you. Instead, you can drive the future marketplace in your direction by anticipating change and building networks that provide marketing strength." In the classroom, Srivastava finds his EMBA students have an appreciation of the link between marketing strategy and financial performance. A decision to invest $50 million in a particular production plant is very real to them, he says, particularly when it comes to the question of whether an enhanced plant can pay for itself or if it will require additional marketing dollars. Making research a priority To keep the marketing research pipeline full, Goizueta continues to add new marketing faculty. Assistant Professor of Marketing Jakki Thomas joined the Goizueta team this fall, coming from Stanford University. Associate Professor of Marketing Doug Bowman and Assistant Professor of Marketing Devon Johnson have been teaching less than two years at Goizueta. For Bowman, who came from Purdue University, the chance to come to a school where marketing research is a high priority was attractive. "At Purdue, marketing didn't have momentum," he says. "Here it attracts better students, there are more electives, it's easier to get guest speakers, and there is more collaboration on research ideas." Bowman teaches one of the newer marketing electives, "Product and Brand Management," which has quickly become one of the more heavily subscribed classes at Goizueta. Bowman's current research interest is finishing a paper on the long-term effect of promotions on consumers -- "basically the conclusion is that people learn to wait for promotions." Bowman has also written about consumer learning and buying behavior in new product categories, and he is currently researching customer-initiated contacts with manufacturers and measuring the effects of these contacts on customer loyalty. "In the past, customers with a question about the product seldom contacted the company. Today there is a huge ramp-up in direct contacts. We're trying to explain changes in loyalty based on how the contact is managed by the company. So our first paragraph is that this should be considered part of the company's marketing effort." To Bowman, the renewed interest in marketing strategy is analogous to the boom in finance twenty years ago. Both, he thinks, were the result of new and better kinds of data. "Accountability is a major issue in corporations these days. Does my marketing work? Now there are data from large numbers of customers, but more importantly, data collected over time. When you look longitudinally at a customer, you can more correctly identify the drivers of their behavior." Johnson, who came to Goizueta from the London Business School, has lately been studying the disintermediation effects of e-commerce on in-house salespeople, a topic that was triggered by the real-life business problems of Avon Products. When Avon began considering how to incorporate e-commerce, it had to choose between bypassing its traditional sales force or creating individual websites for each salesperson and then channeling customers to those sites. "Disintermediation is about how to achieve a mix that includes direct selling but also maintains the motivation of your in-house salespeople," Johnson says. Johnson believes rising consumer expectations is one of the biggest influences on product marketing today. The expectation today is that products must be convenient to use and simplify the customer's life. The downside for academics is that rapid change makes it harder to produce up-to-date research. "Projects get outdated before they get finished. If you are doing empirical work on the Internet environment, you have to move very quickly. That's why you see a lot that is written about e-commerce in the more managerial journals such as Harvard Business Review where you can get your ideas through faster," Johnson says. While publishing is important, Srivastava notes that there is another distribution channel for research: the classroom. "How do you become a preeminent school? By teaching leaders. We need to not only get articles in journals, but to get the ideas in those articles into the hands of the business community. Teaching thirty executives might be just as important." In the coming years, Goizeuta will continue to duke it out with peers such as Columbia University, Dartmouth College, The Wharton School, and Harvard University for a position at the top of the marketing heap. Research in the business school environment, Srivastava says, is like research and development to Intel. "Our investments are in people, and we will continue to make those investments," says Srivastava. "We want to be considered a group of scholars, not only with original, robust ideas, but with the knowledge of what to do with them. To teach leaders you have to get your fingers dirty." |
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