Leadership Spotlight

Dawn Iacobucci, who joined the marketing department from Northwestern's Kellogg School last year, is a world leader is creating conceptual models of customer satisfaction, while Eric Bradlow, W'88, academic director of Wharton's Small Business Development Center, is an applied statistician who uses high-powered statistical models to solve problems on everything from Internet search engines to retail product assortment issues.

"We are able to say things much more definitively," says Reibstein, the former executive director of the Marketing Science Institute. "We are able to characterize what it is that customers want and how much they want it and we can assess, if we make changes, what the impact will be. The result is that companies are much less wasteful with resources and much more directive in trying to provide things for customers." Reibstein, whose current research looks at the impact of marketing on financial metrics, is also the creator of the CMO Summit, which each year brings together industry's top marketing executives from companies such as Procter & Gamble, Dell, and AOL Time Warner.

In fact, many of the School's research centers specifically bridge the gap between academic assessment and real industry impact. The Jay H. Baker Retailing Initiative, for example, which is headed by Hoch, works to understand everything from branding to how manufacturers interrelate with retailers. The Initiative includes the involvement of high-ranking officials from companies including Williams-Sonoma, Home Depot, The Gap and the Neiman Marcus Group, among myriad others, and highlights cross-disciplinary strengths in marketing, operations, finance, real estate and entrepreneurship. (For more on the Baker Retailing Initiative, see "Retail Research Takes Off.") At the William and Phyllis Mack Center for Technological Innovation, co-directed by Day, a cadre of marketing professors is studying new product development processes. "Apple has sold over four million Ipods," says Hoch. "One of our newly tenured faculty members, Christophe Van den Bulte, has looked at how this has happened and has modeled the underlying social contagion process."

Taking a Poke at Sacred Cows

As a group, Wharton's marketing faculty has never been shy of controversy. Professor Peter Fader, for instance, became a music industry gadfly in the late 1990s after creating diagnostic forecasting models the likes of which the music industry had never seen. Fader was eager to share "the answer" to understanding years of languishing sales and profits with top music industry executives, but found that, without exception, the industry defined itself as a "creative" one, not to be ruled by business analyses.

And while the music industry is perhaps the most vivid example of an industry loathe to change its business practices, Fader says it's simply one of many self-defined creative businesses, from baseball to book publishing, that have typically relied on instinct over quantitative analysis when making strategic decisions. "These are very general issues," says Fader, who is leading a plan to create a Media and Entertainment Initiative at Wharton. "The music industry just happens to be an extreme example. Too many industries really think their patterns are different and that they can't learn from other businesses. They need to swallow their pride, drop traditional ways of evaluating success, and embrace the right kinds of quantitative metrics with no hesitation. It's important to realize just how astonishingly consistent the buying patterns are across industries. People are people. When you focus on the behavioral data as opposed to the surface-level details of a product, it doesn't really matter what product it is."

The movie business is another artistic industry that, until very recently, wanted little to do with forecasting. But marketing professor Jehoshua Eliashberg has changed that, creating Moviemod, a prerelease market evaluation tool for motion pictures that generates box office forecasts that help support marketing, advertising and distribution-related decisions for a new movie after it has been produced, but before its public release.

Because Moviemod doesn't rely on historical sales data for calibration, unlike other forecast models, film producers and distributors can also use the tool to fine-tune marketing strategies and maximize ticket sales. As a follow up, Eliashberg, Wharton doctoral student Ye Hu and marketing professor Jagmohan Raju are now developing a model that forecasts demand for motion picture videos and DVDs, research spawned from previous work Raju and Eliashberg did for a major motion picture studio.