image: The 2009-10 Practice Prize winners are Sonke Albers, Christian-Albrechts-University at Kiel, and Marc Fischer, University of Passau. Prize Committee Chair Russell Winer, New York University, is shown on the far right. view more
Credit: Marni Clippinger
The 2009-2010 INFORMS Society for Marketing Science MSI Practice Prize was presented at the January 2010 Marketing Science Conference to Marc Fischer, University of Passau, and Sönke Albers, Christian-Albrechts-University at Kiel, for their project, "Dynamic Marketing Budget Allocation across Countries, Products, and Marketing Activities."
The January 15-16 meeting, held at the Massachusetts institute of Technology, provided a forum for leading-edge practitioners and practical marketing scientists to share perspectives on developments in quantitative approaches to marketing problems.
It was co-sponsored by the INFORMS Society for Marketing Science, the European Marketing Academy, the Massachusetts Institute for Technology, and the Marketing Science Institute, and was chaired by V. Kumar, Richard and Susan Lenny Distinguished Chair Professor in Marketing, Georgia State University.
Fischer and Albers were among four finalists who presented their work at the meeting. Their winning presentation described a project conducted for the pharmaceutical company Bayer that provided an innovative solution to the dynamic marketing allocation budget problem for multi-product, multi-country firms.
"This work—as well as that of the other finalists--represents the finest of what marketing scientists have to offer practitioners. Each finalist used advanced marketing science modeling approaches to help the client company improve its profits, some quite substantially," noted Practice Prize Committee chair Russell Winer, William Joyce Professor of Marketing, New York University.
The other finalists were:
- John Roberts, Australian National University and London Business School, Ken Roberts and Alan Simpson, both of Forethought Research, and Peter Danaher, Melbourne Business School, for "Jetstar: Driving the Brand." This presentation described the use of a marketing science model by Jetstar, a subsidiary of Australia's leading airline, QANTAS, to effectively and profitably compete in the low-cost carrier marketplace.
- Joep Arts, VU University Amsterdam, Koen Pauwels, Ozyegin University and Dartmouth College, and Thorsten Wiesel, University of Groningen, for "Marketing's Profit Impact: Quantifying Online and Offline Funnel Progression." Inofec, an SME in the business-to-business sector, sought a more analytical approach to allocate marketing resources across communication activities and channels. A field experiment by Arts, Pauwels, and Wiesel yielded net profit increases fourteen times larger than those for the status-quo allocation.
- V. Kumar and Denish Shah, both of Georgia State University, and Jac Herschler, Prudential, for "Uncovering Implicit Customer Needs for Determining Explicit Product Positioning: Growing Prudential Annuities' Variable Annuity Sales." This project led to the development and implementation of the "Emotion Quotient" tool which enabled the financial planner to pitch the appropriate variable annuity product to each customer.
Papers and reports on these marketing science implementations will appear in a forthcoming issue of Marketing Science. DVDs of past winners is available at http://www3.informs.org/site/ISMS_DVD/index.php?c=35&kat=ISMS+DVDs&p=6%7C.