Dr. Frédéric Brunel, Boston University School of Management

Professor Frédéric Brunel (Ph.D. in Marketing, University of Washington) is an applied consumer researcher dedicated to informing two main domains of marketing practice: consumer relationships and product design. His research strives for both theoretical and substantive contributions and focuses on applications and concepts of direct relevance and importance to marketers. These include, for example, consumption communities on and off-line, word-of-mouth dynamics, customer relationship management (CRM) and aesthetic response styles and skill sets. In order to inform these domains, Frédéric Brunel is committed to developing a deep and contextualized understanding of the various social-psychological and cultural factors that can guide and moderate consumers’ responses in these marketing applications. Thus, his scholarly work resides at the intersection of social-psychology and cultural anthropology and focuses comprehensively on culture, group/community and personality/gender levels of analyses.

He has published extensively in journals such as Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Consumer Psychology, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Journal of Advertising, Journal of Advertising Research, and Psychology and Marketing. He has presented his work in numerous forums including conferences. His research has also appeared in book chapters, managerial articles and in a series of articles in conference proceedings. He has been a reviewer for all of the major journals and conferences in his field of specialization. His work is used by some of the largest corporations and he is regularly quoted and interviewed in a wide array of print, radio, TV and electronic media outlets.

At Boston University, Professor Brunel teaches in the undergraduate, MBA, doctoral and executive programs. His teaching emphasizes the interdependences and connections between marketing and other business functions. He has been a leader in the design and implementation of the integrated cross functional undergraduate core curriculum (SM323) at Boston University School of Management. Professor Brunel has extensive international teaching experience, including Europe, Latin America and Asia. Over the years, his commitment to higher education has been recognized through several teaching and service awards.

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Dr. Walter Carl, Northeastern University

Walter J. Carl, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Department of Communication Studies
Northeastern University

Dr. Walter Carl conducts research and teaches in the areas of interpersonal and organizational communication. His publications include book chapters and journal articles on the topics of social interaction, personal relationships, and how relationships serve as a basis for influence and persuasion. His most recent research investigates word-of-mouth as it is embedded in routine, everyday communication practices, with a special emphasis on analyzing actual conversations and unique relationship histories. Dr. Carl also designs research-based consulting and training interventions for companies, universities, and not-for-profit organizations to help them with a variety of interpersonal and organizational communication processes. Dr. Carl received his Ph.D. from the University of Iowa and his master's degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Home Page: http://www.atsweb.neu.edu/w.carl

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Dr. Amar Cheema, Washington University

Amar Cheema is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at Washington University in St. Louis, where he teaches consumer behavior and decision making. He has a Ph.D. from the University of Colorado at Boulder, an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta, and a BE in Electronics and Communication Engineering from Delhi University.

Amar studies factors affecting individuals’ decisions to engage in word-of-mouth and the effect of online versus offline word-of-mouth on purchases. His research interests also include bidding behavior in auctions, spending with credit cards, budgeting and self-control, the effect of goals on performance, and consumer evaluations of coupons.

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Dr. Chrysanthos Dellarocas, University of Maryland R.H. School of Business

Dr. Chrysanthos "Chris" Dellarocas
University of Maryland R.H. Smith School of Business

Dr. Dellarocas's work focuses on the study of online "word-of-mouth" communities and their impact on marketing, product development, and public opinion. He also studies the use of online reputation mechanisms as a trust-building device in electronic markets.

Working Papers

"Strategic Manipulation of Internet Opinion Forums: Implications
for Consumers and Firms." August 2004

"The Digitization of Word-of-Mouth: Promise and Challenges of Online Reputation Systems." October 2003.

"Cooperation Without Enforcement? A Comparative Analysis of Litigation and Online Reputation as Quality Assurance Mechanisms" (with Y. Bakos). March 2003

Official Site

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Dr. Peter Fader, Wharton School of Business

Wharton School of Business
Frances and Pei-Yuan Chia Professor
Professor of Marketing

Professor Fader's expertise centers around the analysis of behavioral data to understand and forecast customer shopping/purchasing activities. He works with a wide range of data sources from industries such as consumer packaged goods, e-commerce, and music (online and offline). Much of his research highlights the common behavioral patterns that exist across these and other seemingly different domains. Currently, he is focusing on demonstrating the usefulness of probability models for data-intensive managerial problems, as a contrast to data mining and other popular (but often inappropriate) techniques. He covers these methods in a rigorous new course, "Applied Probability Models in Marketing" (syllabus available below). Professor Fader believes that marketing should not be viewed as a "soft" discipline, and he frequently works with different companies and industry associations to improve managerial perspectives and practices in this regard. His work has been published in (and he serves on the editorial boards of) a number of leading journals in marketing, statistics, and the management sciences.

Research Areas
Using behavorial data to understand and forecast customer shopping/purchasing activities across a wide range of industries such as consumer packaged goods, e-commerce, and music (online and offline). Managerial applications focus on topics such as customer relationship management, lifetime value of the customer, and the impact of digital downloading (and filesharing) on music purchasing/consumption habits.

Current Projects
Building a variety of predictive and explanatory models for electronic commerce (e.g., forecasting models for website usage and purchasing behavior), the music industry (e.g., understanding the role of pre-launch orders in generating album sales), and consumer packaged goods (e.g., models of new product trial and repeat purchasing patterns).

Official Site

The Cool Numbers Site

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Dr. David Godes, Harvard Business School

Harvard Business School

Dave holds a Ph.D. and S.M. in Management from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a B.S. in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania. Much of his current research focuses on incentives and compensation issues, particularly as they relate to salespeople. In addition, he is also interested in research issues concerning the Internet and the marketing impact of fashions, trends and word-of-mouth.

Prior to returning to MIT to join the doctoral program, Dave started and ran his own market research and consulting firm which served a range of clients throughout the Northeast drawn from banking, mortgage lending, health care management and venture capital. Prior to that, he was a Senior Product Manager at a New England consumer bank.

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Dr. Robert Kozinets, York University Schulich School of Business

Robert V. Kozinets is an Associate Professor of Marketing at York University's Schulich School of Business. An anthropologist by training, he developed and continues to expand the technique of netnography or Internet ethnography for the marketing-related study of virtual communities and computer-mediated communications. He has also been instrumental in developing videography as a marketing and consumer research methodology. His research on virtual communications, online branding, community marketing, and retailing has been published in journals such as the Journal of Marketing, the Journal of Consumer Research, the Journal of Marketing Research, the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography and the Journal of Retailing. He is currently editing a volume on Consumer Tribes along with Avi Shankar and Bernard Cova.

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Dr. Katherine Lemon, Boston College Carroll School of Management

Dr. Katherine Lemon
Associate Professor
Boston College Carroll School of Management

Dr. Lemon's research and expertise is in the areas of customer equity, customer asset management and customer-based marketing strategy. She has conducted research in a myriad of global industries, including financial services, consumer packaged goods, retailing, telecommunications, interactive television, computing, high-technology electronics, and emerging e-commerce companies.

Working Papers

"The Theoretical Underpinnings of Customer Asset Management: A Framework and Propositions for Future Research" (with R. Bolton) October, 2004

"Return on Marketing: Using Customer Equity to Focus Marketing Strategy" (with R. Rust and V. Zeithmal) 2004

"What is the True Value of a Lost Customer?" (with J. Hogan and B. Libai) 2003

"Developing Synergies Between Promotions and Brands in Different Price-Quality Tiers" 2002

Official Site

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Dr. Barak Libai, Tel Aviv University

Barak Libai is a senior lecturer at the Faculty of Management, Tel Aviv University, and a visiting Associate Professor of Marketing at the MIT Sloan School of Management. His research focuses on consumer social interactions such as word-of-mouth and how they affect the growth of markets for new products. He is also interested in ways to place a monetary tag on the value of word-of-mouth interactions. His research on the value for the firm of consumer word-of-mouth over the product life cycle has won awards from the Marketing Science Institute, American Marketing Association and the Journal of Service Research.

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Dr. Puneet Manchanda, Graduate School of Business, University of Chicago

Puneet Manchanda is Associate Professor of Marketing at the Graduate School of Business, University of Chicago. He received his M.Phil, and Ph.D. in Marketing from Columbia University, his MBA in Marketing and Finance from the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, India and his BSEE from BITS, Pilani, India. Prior to joining the University of Chicago, he held various marketing positions at Unilever. He teaches the capstone marketing strategy class at the University of Chicago in the full-time, part-time and executive MBA programs.

Professor Manchanda's main research interest is in building models to solve strategic marketing problems such as word-of-mouth marketing, resource allocation, launch planning and CRM. His most recent work has focused on marketing strategy problems in the pharmaceutical, hi-technology, gaming and insurance industries. He has presented his research at many universities in the United States and abroad and his papers have appeared in Marketing Science, Journal of Marketing Research and Marketing Letters. In 2001, he was among a select group of scholars "identified as the potential leaders of the next generation of marketing academics" by the Marketing Science Institute.

Professor Manchanda has been an invited speaker at various industry research conferences. He collaborates with companies on research/consulting/education projects in the United States and Asia. These companies span a broad range of industries spanning pharmaceuticals, hi-technology, consumer packaged goods and insurance. His research and commentary on current topics has been published in business media outlets such the New York Times, the Baltimore Sun, Investors Business Daily and Forbes.com.

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Dr. Dina Mayzlin, Yale School of Management

Dr. Dina Mayzlin
Assistant Professor of Marketing
Yale School of Management

Professor Mayzlin's research focuses on word of mouth online. She is studying how firms can influence online conversations as well as how firms can measure these conversations to perform market research. Her other interests include public relations and the marketing of fashion goods.

Working Papers

"The Effect of Word of Mouth Online: Online Book Reviews" (with J. Chevalier) October, 2003

"Using Online Conversations to Measure Word-of-Mouth Communications," (with D. Godes) 2003

"Promotional Chat on the Internet," 2003

"The Influence of Social Networks on The Effectiveness of Promotional Strategies," 2002

Official Site

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Dr. Carl Mela, Fuqua School of Business, Duke University

Professor of Marketing
Fuqua School of Business
Duke University

Carl F. Mela is a Professor of Marketing at Duke University. He received his Sc. B. from Brown University and Ph.D. from Columbia University. His research focuses upon the long-term effects of marketing activity and Internet marketing. Articles along these lines have appeared in the Journal of Marketing Research, Marketing Science, the Journal of Consumer Research, and other journals. His research has received nine best paper awards from the Marketing Science Institute, the European Marketing Academy, the Institute for Operations Research and Management, the Direct Marketing Education Foundation, and the American Marketing Association. He serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, Marketing Science, Marketing Letters and the Journal of Public Policy and Marketing as well as the analytics adviory board of Information Resources.

His home page is located at http://faculty.fuqua.duke.edu/~mela/bio

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Dr. Lance Porter, Louisiana State University, Manship School of Mass Communication, Laboratory for Creative Arts and Technology

Assistant Professor
Louisiana State University
Manship School of Mass Communication
Laboratory for Creative Arts and Technology

Porter has more than 12 years of marketing experience in the entertainment, biotech, hospitality, banking and insurance industries. He has focused on new media since 1995, when he built his first commercial Web site.

Prior to starting New Media Mind, Porter spent four years as executive director of Internet marketing for Disney, formulating the creative and media strategies for more than 80 films released under Touchstone and Disney Pictures. In 2002, he won both a Clio and a Key Art Award for his work as a producer on the official movie site for "The Royal Tenenbaums." At the University of Georgia, Porter helped start the New Media Institute.

Porter holds a Ph.D. in mass communication with an emphasis in new media from the University of Georgia. He currently serves as an assistant professor of advertising and public relations in the Manship School of Mass Communication at Louisiana State University. He holds a joint appointment with the Laboratory for Creative Arts and Technology (LCAT), where he heads an interdisciplinary project conducting research on the uses and applications of online media.

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Emanuel Rosen, Author, "The Anatomy of Buzz"

Emanuel Rosen,
Author, The Anatomy of Buzz

Emanuel Rosen first became interested in buzz when he was the VP Marketing at Niles Software in Berkeley, California. There he was responsible for launching and marketing the company's flagship product, EndNote, which spread to a large extent by word of mouth. Emanuel started researching this phenomenon and especially how it can be accelerated. After selling his share in the company in 1998, he interviewed 165 individuals - researchers, consumers, and executives who were successful in building buzz for their brands. The result is The Anatomy of Buzz, which "has managed to generate quite a bit of buzz itself" as Business Week Online noted. The book hit the Wall Street Journal's business best-seller list and was translated into ten langauges. Steve Jurvetson, one of the investors behind Hotmail who coined the term Viral Marketing, wrote of the book: "Every new company and new product manager hopes to benefit from buzz. Many hope that it will just happen, and they are disappointed when it does not. The Anatomy of Buzz explains how to make it happen, bringing analysis, strategy, and insight to the black art of buzz."

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Dr. Mohan Sawhney, Kellogg School of Management

Mohanbir Sawhney is the McCormick Tribune Professor of Technology and the Director of the Center for Research in Technology & Innovation at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University.

Prof. Sawhney is a globally recognized scholar, teacher, consultant and speaker in strategic marketing, e-business and innovation. His research and teaching interests include collaborative marketing with customers, IT and business agility, customer-centric organization design, organic growth and business innovation. He has been widely recognized as a thought leader. Business Week named him as one of the 25 most influential people in e-Business. Crain's Chicago Business named him a member of "40 under 40", a select group of young business leaders in the Chicago area. He is a Fellow of the World Economic Forum.

Prof. Sawhney is the co-author of three books - The Seven Steps to Nirvana: Strategic Insights into eBusiness Transformation, Techventure: New Rules for Value and Profit from Silicon Valley, and Kellogg on Technology & Innovation. He has also co-authored PhotoWars, a strategy simulation game. His research has been published in leading journals like California Management Review, Harvard Business Review, Journal of Interactive Marketing, Management Science, Marketing Science, MIT Sloan Management Review, and Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science. He has also written several influential trade articles in publications like the Financial Times, CIO Magazine, and Business 2.0. He has won several awards for his teaching and research, including the 2001 Accenture Award for the best paper published in California Management Review in 2000 and the Outstanding Professor of the Year at Kellogg in 1998.

Prof. Sawhney advises and speaks to Global 2000 firms and governments worldwide. His recent speaking and consulting clients include ABN-AMRO Bank, Accenture, Bank of America, Boeing, Cisco Systems, Dell, Denstu, Dow Chemical Company, Eli Lilly, Ericsson, General Mills, Goldman Sachs, Hallmark, Honeywell, IBM Consulting Services, Infosys, Kraft Foods, Microsoft, Motorola, NCR Teradata, Nomura Research Institute, Rockwell Automation, Sony, Telemar and Thomson Corporation. He has served as an advisor to the Government of Oman, and is an advisor to the U.S. Jordan Business Alliance. He serves on the boards and advisory boards of several technology startup companies, including Edmunds.com, IntelliSeek, MarketRx and Confluent Surgical.

Prof. Sawhney holds a Ph.D. in marketing from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania; a Master's degree in management from the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta; and a Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi. He is married to Tia Sawhney, and they have two young children. He lives in Evanston, Illinois.

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Dr. Don Schultz, Northwestern University, Medill School of Management

Dr. Don Schultz
Professor of Integrated Marketing Communications
Medill School of Journalism, Northwestern University
President, Agora, Inc.

Don E. Schultz is presently Professor Emeritus-in-Service of Integrated Marketing Communications at the Medill School of Journalism, Northwestern University. He is also President of the consulting firm, Agora, Inc. both located in Evanston, Illinois. Additionally, he is a Visiting Professor at Cranfield School of Management, Bedfordshire, UK, Adjunct Professor at Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia, and Visiting Professor, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China.

Schultz has consulted, lectured and held seminars on integrated marketing communication, marketing, advertising, sales promotion, brands and branding, and communication management in Europe, South America, Asia, the Middle East, Australia, and North America. His articles have appeared in numerous professional trade publications and academic journals including Advertising Age, Journal of Advertising Research, Journal of Advertising, and Marketing News. Professor Schultz was the founding editor of the Journal of Direct Marketing. He has served as the Associate Editor of the Journal of Marketing Communications, and on the editorial review board for a number of trade and scholarly publications. He is also a regular columnist for Marketing News and Marketing Management.

He is author/co-author of thirteen books, Strategic Advertising Campaigns, Essentials of Advertising Strategy, Essentials of Sales Promotion, Sales Promotion Management, Strategic Newspaper Marketing, and Measuring Brand Communication ROI. His book, Integrated Marketing Communications, was the first text in this emerging field.

Schultz' recent books include Communicating Globally and Raising the Corporate Umbrella. He and his wife Heidi have co-authored an update on the seminal text on IMC, IMC: Next Generation, as well as Brand Babble: Sense and Nonsense about Brands and Branding.

Schultz is former director of the Promotion Marketing Association of America and past Chairman, Accrediting Committee, Accrediting Council in Journalism and Mass Communications. He has also served as Director, Institute of Advanced Advertising Studies, as public member on The National Advertising Review Board and was a founding member of the Board of Directors of the Virginia Commonwealth University's Ad Center. He is also co-chair of the IMC Committee of the Advertising Research Foundation. He was selected the first Direct Marketing Educator of the Year by the Direct Marketing Educational Foundation. He was named Educator of the Year by the Chicago Chapter, Sales and Marketing Executives Association. American Advertising Federation named him Distinguished Advertising Educator of the Year. Sales and Marketing Management magazine named Schultz one of the "80 Most Influential People in Sales and Marketing". He is also a member of the American Marketing Association, American Academy of Advertising, Advertising Research Foundation, Association for Consumer Research, Business Marketing Association, Direct Marketing Association, and the International Advertising Association. He is past Chairman, Communications Committee, Illinois Division, and the American Cancer Society.

Schultz maintains a busy academic life. In addition to his duties at Northwestern University, he hold visiting professor appointments at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia, Cranfield University in Milton Keynes, England, Tsinghua University in Beijing China, and is a frequent guest lecturer at the Swedish School of Economics, Helsinki, Finland.

Schultz has served on the board of directors of a number of corporations, including Penton Media, Inc., Cleveland, The Simon Richards Group, Melbourne, Australia, Brand Finance plc, London, Insignia Systems, Inc., Minneapolis and dunnhumby associates, London.

Schultz resides in Evanston with his wife and business partner, Heidi.

Official Site

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George Silverman, Author, "The Secrets of Word of Mouth Marketing"

George Silverman, President of Market Navigation, Inc., is a recovered and reformed psychologist (ABD for a Ph.D. in educational psychology). His primary interest is in the psychology of marketing, decision-making, persuasion and particularly word of mouth, for which the formal study of psychology had not prepared him, but 30 years of marketing consulting has.

His book, The Secrets of Word of Mouth Marketing; How to Trigger Exponential Sales Through Runaway Word of Mouth was published by AMACOM in 2001.

He is the inventor of the telephone focus group, co-inventor of the peer word of mouth group (widely acknowledged to be the most powerful marketing method ever developed in the pharmaceutical industry), and has successfully used word of mouth techniques to accelerate purchase decisions for some of the most successful products ever introduced, including the VCR, the automatic teller machine, the Trac II razor, the NordicTrack and many of the most successful pharmaceutical launches in history. He is a past Treasurer and Board member of the Qualitative Research Consultants Association (QRCA), and has been Chairman of its Professionalism Committee.

George is also a close-up illusionist. He is the Workshop and Lecture Chairman of the Parent Assembly of the Society of American Magicians and a member of the Academy of Magical Arts (The Magic Castle) in L.A. He is one of the leading close-up magicians who convene yearly from around the world at the FFFF convention. It is the most exclusive, invitational only, highly prestigious close-up magic conclave. He uses illusions in his seminars and workshops to create a sense of open-minded wonder, to illustrate many of the illusions of marketing, and to instill a willingness to consider breakthrough possibilities.

About the parallels of marketing and magic he says, "I just like to remind people that things are not always as they seem, there's more than meets the eye, that you have to examine conventional wisdom because much of it is just very realistic-looking illusion, and most of all to remind people that they can do the impossible."

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David Teten, CEO, Nitron Advisors

David Teten is a serial entrepreneur who builds businesses that leverage social software. He is CEO of Nitron Advisors, an independent research firm that provides hedge funds, venture capitalists, and other institutional investors with direct access to frontline industry experts. He is also Chairman of Teten Recruiting, an executive recruiting firm specializing in serving the institutional investor, investment banking, and strategy consulting industries.

David is the coauthor of The Virtual Handshake: Opening Doors and Closing Deals Online, the first mass market book about how people can use online networks to become dramatically more effective: to sell more clients, raise more capital, sign more business partners, and recruit star employees. The book has received rave reviews in BusinessWeek, Harvard Business School Working Knowledge, and from many industry leaders.

David runs TheVirtualHandshake.com social software resource site and blog; co-writes a monthly column on online networks for FastCompany.com; and is a contributing author for BLOG! How the Newest Media Revolution is Changing Politics, Business, and Culture (CDS Books, fall 2005). He was named a "2005 Future HR Leader" by Human Capital magazine for Nitron Advisors' unique use of social software for recruiting.

TheVirtualHandshake.com

Brain Food blog

FastCompany column

Official Site

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Dr. Catherine Tucker, MIT Sloan School of Management

Dr. Catherine Tucker,
Assistant Professor of Marketing,
MIT Sloan School of Management

Catherine Tucker is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at MIT. She holds a Ph.D. in economics from Stanford University and a BA in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from Oxford University.

Her current research focuses on empirically quantifying micro-influences on the adoption of new technologies. In particular, she is interested in how new technology purchases are affected by the previous purchase decisions and word-of-mouth by friends and colleagues in the customer's social network.

Her other research interests include the effectiveness of trial periods in encouraging technology adoption, the effectiveness of affiliate marketing programs and the extent to which firms introducing new products enjoy a first-mover advantage.

Official Site

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Edward Weiss, Carey Business School of Johns Hopkins University

Edward Weiss, MS Marketing
Academic Advisor to the Graduate Department of Marketing and
Practitioner Faculty

Mr. Weiss, the Academic Advisor for the Graduate Department of Marketing, has been teaching at the Carey Business School (formerly School of Professional Studies in Business and Education) for eight years in the areas of brand management, promotional strategy, corporate communications, and consumer behavior. He manages the Applied Research Project (ARP), the final requirement of the Master of Science in Marketing degree. To complete the ARP, each student recruits an organization sponsor for whom they will conduct market analysis and use both secondary and quantifiable primary research to solve a marketing problem.

Mr. Weiss has served as vice president of marketing and product development for two consumer products companies and as director of marketing for a B-to-B computer software company. He uses his 25-years of day-to-day marketing experience to enhance the academic studies of the classroom. Mr. Weiss employed word-of-mouth marketing extensively throughout his career to help his companies compete with businesses far larger than they were. He is a proponent of this powerful tool when it is used ethically and is aligned with the brand essence of an organization.

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Dr. Andrea Wojnicki, University of Toronto Rotman School of Management

Dr. Andrea Wojnicki
Rotman School of Management
University of Toronto

Professor Andrea Wojnicki is a member of the marketing faculty at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto. She earned her doctorate in Marketing from Harvard Business School and her MBA from York University. Most of her current research projects focus on consumers' word-of-mouth behaviors, particularly who generates WOM, under what conditions, and why.

Prior to her academic career, Professor Wojnicki worked in brand management at Kraft Foods. She also worked in advertising and retail management. She has consulted to firms in the automotive, banking, and other industries.

Official site

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