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While working in industry, Green carried on with his
studies, completing his master's degree under the tutelage
of luminary Simon Kuznets, who would go on to win the
Nobel Prize in 1971. "Everyone viewed Kuznets with awe,
as did I, although perhaps a bit less so, as I was working
in industry," says Green, adding that Kuznets was "kind
but all business." He went on to become Wharton professor
Morris Hamburg's first doctoral student in statistics.
"My tutelage was without peer," Green says.
In 1961, Green was recruited by DuPont to work in
market planning at their Wilmington headquarters.
There Green was able to apply the subject of his PhDdissertation on Bayesian inference in his study of the
cost versus the value of marketing research information.
When Wharton professor Wroe Alderson offered him
an academic appointment in 1962, Green left DuPont
to work full-time in Wharton's marketing department.
Alderson went on to become a major influence in Green's
academic career, co-authoring Planning and Problem
Solving in Marketing with him and persuading companies
to partner with Wharton in myriad market research studies
that made use of Green's techniques.
Green's 12-year stint in industry provided the real-
world direction his research would become famous for.
"Sometimes these two motivations—the theoretical and
the pragmatic—will merge and lead to a high-impact
result, that is, an idea that is both intellectually exciting
and appealing to the practitioner," he observed in a University
of Pennsylvania Fellow's Award speech in 1992.
Those high-impact results are now commonplace market
research techniques. Perceptual mapping, segmentation,
product mapping, cluster analysis, and most importantly,
conjoint analysis, are used every day in university market
research departments around the world. Many of these
market research methods were key in deciding the future of
products today's consumers now consider indispensable.
In 1963, for instance, Green and others in the marketing
department worked with Bell Laboratories on the first cell
phone. At the time, AT&T had developed a picture phone
that had not been successful. Green's study involved a kind
of car phone that was not yet on the market. A thousand
people were recruited, loaned cars and given gasoline allowances
to test out various intra-car telephones. Green and his
team surveyed subjects on their driving and talking patterns
and preferences such as what kind of headset they liked,
even including a subset of people who enjoyed listening to
certain tones and quality of speech.
Changing the Field of Marketing
Green came up with the idea and the name for conjoint
analysis while reading a research article from a mathematical
psychology journal. The paper, "Simultaneous conjoint
measurement: A new type of fundamental measurement,"
by R.D. Luce and J.W. Tukey, was published in 1964 in the
Journal of Mathematical Psychology and provided a new
system to measure rank order data.
"It occurred to me after reading the article that this could
be applied to marketing as opposed to just a measurement,"
Green said. "We could give people bundles of things
that they might want and measure how they react." The idea
that his models could be useful beyond finding out what
characteristics already appealed to people was a revelation.
Green began to wonder if he could predict what people
would do in the future based on how they answered questions
about likes and dislikes.
Indeed, he found that he could. Green's first commercial
application of conjoint analysis was with Bissell, a vacuum
manufacturer then interested in creating a new kind of
product container. Today, Green's statistical modeling technique
has been applied to an enormous list of products
and services. And all kinds of companies, from those selling
bar soaps and gasoline to those selling luxury automobiles
and pharmaceuticals, have partnered with Green
and Wharton to learn more about consumer preference and
market segmentation.
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