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Powerful Analytical Tools
As a field, marketing began to take shape in the 1920s,
when Wharton professor and chair of the "merchandising"
department Herbert Hess began exploring the psychological
aspects of marketing. Hess, who studied issues such as crowd
psychology, attention spans and memory—and their implications
for companies that wanted to sell products—was
among the first to suggest that companies should adapt
products to customer needs.
Wroe Alderson built on these foundations during
the 1940s and 1950s. A former consultant who came to
Wharton and became the leading marketing theoretician of
his time, Alderson was assisted by his colleague, Reavis Cox,
and in 1948 wrote a path-breaking essay titled "Towards a
Theory of Marketing." Alderson saw mathematical models
and quantitative techniques
could be used to research
and analyze consumer
taste, the size of advertising
budgets and sales forces,
and the distribution of
marketing messages across
media—techniques that
helped create the field of
market research.
But Alderson's young collaborator, Paul E. Green, was
perhaps most significant in advancing Wharton's early history
of groundbreaking marketing research and instruction.
In the 1960s, Green created "conjoint analysis," a measurement
tool that allowed companies to chart and analyze consumer
preference and
buying intentions, as
well as their potential
reactions to changes
in existing products
and services or to a
product introduction.
Conjoint analysis
became the marketing
field's most
powerful technique,
and helped make
Green its most widely cited author. Thousands of companies
found practical applications for conjoint analysis, including
hotel conglomerate Marriott Corporation, which hired
Green and Wind to conduct a large-scale consumer study
among business and non-business travelers. The eventual
result was the Courtyard by Marriott concept, which grew
from three hotels in 1983 to more than 450 worldwide today.
In 1996, Green won the coveted Lifetime Achievement
Award in Marketing Research from the American Marketing
Association. (For more on Paul Green's life and work, see
"Wharton's Paul Green: Helping Companies Develop Products Consumers Actually Want."
"This is a department that focuses on translating state-of-the-art, cutting-edge research into decision tools that managers
can use to make better decisions," said Stephen Hoch,
chairman of the Marketing Department. "And this was the
case from the get go."
This focus on methodologies to better measure preferences
and anticipate what people want became a hallmark
of the department. And today, the menu of techniques
market researchers use to learn more about their customers
is staggering. From metaphor elicitation exercises that seek
to discover customers' underlying psychological associations
with the product, to Green's conjoint analysis, today's market
researchers have powerful tools at their disposal, many
of which have been developed by Wharton marketing
professors.
"It used to be that good marketers were people who had
a good feel for people—who could empathize with them,"
says marketing professor David J. Reibstein. "Today we do
it much more by the numbers. With the use of scanner data
and the use of great analytics, marketing today is much more
a science than an art. The strength of the department now is
in this use of analytics."
Lodish, for instance, has created models on everything
from how to analyze promotion expenditures to how to organize
sales people to how to allocate media dollars—models
that have been used, or are in use, by more than half of the
major consumer packaged goods companies in the U.S.
The Marketing Department’s leadership in the field is
matched by its leadership at the School. In all, nine of
the 25-member department hold key leadership posts
within Wharton.
Eric Bradlow, Academic Director, Wharton Small Business
Development Center
George Day, Co-Director, Mack Center for Technological
Innovation; Director, Emerging Technologies Management
Research Program
Stephen Hoch, Director, Jay H. Baker Retailing Initiative
Barbara Kahn, Vice Dean and Director, Wharton Undergraduate
Division
Leonard Lodish, Vice Dean, Wharton West; Senior
Director, Global Consulting Practicum
Robert Meyer, Vice Dean and Director, Wharton Doctoral
Programs
Jagmohan Raju, Director of the Wharton-Indian School
of Business Program
David Schmittlein, Deputy Dean, the Wharton School
Yoram (Jerry) Wind, Director, SEI Center for Advanced
Studies in Management; Academic Director, The
Wharton Fellows Program; Co-Editor, Wharton School
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