Marketing 100
By Nancy Moffitt
How the world's largest, most cited and most published marketing department has changed the world of business.
Frito Lay had a slew
of popular munchies,
from Doritos to
Sun Chips, and lots
of clever, award-winning
television ads to
peddle them. But the
company had an all-too-common problem:
it didn't really
know when or if the
ads were working.
"When I would talk
about this problem to marketing experts, they would tell me
that advertising was an aesthetic kind of a field, that it was
like philosophy or religion or art," said Dwight R. Riskey,
senior vice president of marketing at Pepsico, Frito Lay's parent
company. "They would tell me that you couldn't apply
the tools of science to measure the effect of advertising. And
that is a really interesting approach to something we were
spending hundreds of millions of dollars on. It was massively
frustrating to me."
All that changed in the mid-1990s, when Riskey met and began
working with Wharton marketing professor Leonard Lodish
In a landmark study called "How TV Advertising Works,"
Lodish led a consortium of major consumer packaged goods
manufacturers, leading advertising agencies, and the major
TV networks in the first comprehensive analysis of long-term
advertising effects—research that forever changed the way
companies like Frito Lay manage their advertising.
Not only did the research reveal that nearly half of Frito
Lay's ads were ineffective, it also debunked long-held nostrums
about television advertising, giving Frito Lay the tools
to create guiding principles for managing TV advertising and
setting priorities for ad campaigns.
"It was really significant for our company because the
most common question any person in the field of consumer
insights/market research gets is how advertising works,"
said Riskey. "And literally up until this time period, I don't
think we had anything close to adequate answers. Let's say a
company like Frito Lay might spend $100 million on advertising
a year. If you follow the principles of Len's work and
my work here, theoretically you could reduce waste by 75
percent, 90 percent, at least 50 percent. Even at 50 percent,
that's huge money. That's pretty exciting."
The American Marketing Association agreed. In 1996,
Lodish's research, published in the Journal of Marketing
Research, won the AMA's Paul E. Green award for the article
most likely to affect marketing practice. In 2000, the same
article was awarded the Odell award for the journal article
with the most impact after five years, and was also judged
the best article after five years by the American Marketing
Association's Advertising Special Interest Group.
Lodish's award-winning, practice-changing
work is far
from atypical within the 25-member Wharton Marketing
Department. Professor emeritus Paul Green, for instance,
created the powerful marketing tool conjoint analysis, work
he directly applied to
dozens of industries and that made
him one of marketing's most notable figures. Marketing
professor Jerry Wind, who founded the SEI Center for
Advanced Studies in Management, Wharton's
think tank,
also led the creation of
The Lauder Institute, the Wharton
Fellows Program, Wharton School Publishing and the
Wharton Executive MBA Program, all the while publishing
pioneering, award-winning research on organizational buying
behavior, market segmentation and conjoint analysis.
George Day, author of
the seminal Market Driven Strategy,
has won every major marketing research award and had
more prize-winning articles
in the Journal of Marketing than
anyone else in the field.
This year, the Wharton
Marketing Department turns
100. In the pages that follow, the Wharton Alumni Magazine
offers a glimpse of the many ways the world's largest,
most published and most cited marketing
department has
strengthened and changed the world of business—and the
world of Wharton.
- Powerful Analytical Tools
- Taking a Poke at Sacred Cows
- In the Consumer's Shoes
- Wharton's Paul Green: Helping Companies Develop Products Consumers Actually Want
- The Early Days: Sun Oil and Lukens
- Changing the Field of Marketing
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