image: Jorge Silva-Risso, UC, Riverside (right) accepts the 2006 award from Prize Chair John Roberts. view more
Credit: INFORMS
Hanover, MD, August 10, 2006 -- The 2006 INFORMS Society for Marketing Science today announced that the winning entry in the society's Practice Prize competition is "Incentive Planning System: A Decision Support System for Planning Pricing and Promotions in the Automobile Industry" by a joint team of Professor Jorge Silva-Risso from the University of California, Riverside and J.D. Power's Irina Ionova.
The competition took place at the 28th Marketing Science Conference, hosted by the Katz Graduate School of Business at the University of Pittsburgh.
The Prize is supported by grants from the Marketing Science Institute, the Brand Science Institute, the Institute for the Study of Business Markets, the European Marketing Academy, and the Australian Marketing Institute, in conjunction with the Australian and New Zealand Academy of Marketing.
The winning work reports on a promotion analysis tool that enabled automobile manufacturers to improve the timing, frequency, and components of their promotional activity to maintain sales but reduce margin loss. The authors presented evidence of savings in the order of $2 billion, with Daimler Chrylser executives alone claiming annual benefits of $500 million. The researchers used the sales data available to J.D. Power to help it work with individual car manufacturers to calculate the dynamic impact of sales promotions. The work was implemented in a phased approach, allowing an evolutionary increase in sophistication amongst its users.
The other finalists in the competition, which took place on June 9, were:
- "The Power of CLV" by V. Kumar, Denise Beckman, Tim Bohling, Rajkumar Venkatesan This research described a carefully planned and implemented program within IBM to optimize the number of times the organization "touches" its customers, incorporating innovations with respect to alignment with corporate objectives, forecasting cost to serve, imputing unobserved contribution margins, and allowing for inter-dependence of purchase incidence and quantity.
- " BRAN*EQT: A Model and Simulator for Estimating, Tracking, and Managing Multi-category Brand Equity" by Venkatesh Shankar, Pablo Azar, and Matthew Fuller
In the BRAN*EQT study the researchers examine the drivers of the Allstate brandname. By understanding how advertising investments directly influenced the brand equity of Allstate, the researchers were able to make brand building activities within the firm accountable. This led to advertising changing from being viewed as a discretionary cost to a strategic investment. One of the useful aspects of the research was to untease the benefits of corporate branding into the advantages that were captured by each of the divisions within Allstate.
- "Planning New Tariffs at Tele.Ring – An Integrated STP Tool Designed for Managerial Applicability" by Martin Natter, Andreas Mild, Alfred Taudes, and Udo Wagner
Telering is a leading cellular phone supplier in Austria. A new entrant threatened its position and past experience suggested its share could become marginal as it was squeezed by different players within the market. By undertaking a detailed segmentation study Telering was able to identify a new market opportunity of no upfront subscription charges, which would be difficult for other competitors to mimic. A sophisticated perceptual mapping study not only made the resulting service innovation credible to senior management, overcoming internal barriers to its launch, it also provided ideas as to how the product could be introduced with a compelling and relevant advertising campaign.
The Practice Prize is awarded for an outstanding implementation of marketing science concepts and methods. The methodology used must be sound and appropriate to the problem and organization, and the work should have had significant, verifiable and, preferably quantitative impact on the performance of the client organization. The 2006 Practice Prize Committee was comprised of Nils Andres, (representing the Brand Science Institute), Pete Fader, Delaine Hampton from Procter and Gamble, Dominique Hanssens (representing the Marketing Science Institute), Manfred Krafft, Gary Lilien (representing the Institute for the Study of Business Markets), John Roberts (Prize Committee Chair), Steve Shugan (as Marketing Science editor), Jan-Benedict Steenkamp (representing the European Marketing Academy), and Tulin Erdem (as ISMS President).
As with previous competitions, the presentations were professionally videotaped and have been edited especially for classroom use. These DVD versions of the presentations are in "chapter" format, enabling rapid and easy selection of the aspects of the presentations that instructors wish to highlight. DVD adopters also have access to the papers and the related competition PowerPoint presentations for their use in the classroom. This material, along with the material from previous competitions (available now) will be available by October 15 at http://www.informs.org/Edu/MarketingScience
In addition, papers and reports on these outstanding implementations of marketing science will be appearing in a forthcoming issue of Marketing Science. Short three- to four- minute video summaries of earlier presentations are available at http://www2.informs.org/Edu/MarketingScience/
The INFORMS Society for Marketing Science is soliciting entries for the 2007 Practice Prize Competition. Contact John Roberts at JHRoberts@london.edu for submission details.
The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS®) is an international scientific society with 10,000 members, including Nobel Prize laureates, dedicated to applying scientific methods to help improve decision-making, management, and operations. Members of INFORMS work in business, government, and academia. They are represented in fields as diverse as airlines, health care, law enforcement, the military, financial engineering, and telecommunications. The INFORMS website is http://www.informs.org. More information about operations research is at www.scienceofbetter.org.