The Marketing Group within Aston Business School welcomes two new members of academic staff for the year 2003/4: Dr Mark Palmer and Dr Alex Nicholls.

Dr Palmer joined the Group in July with research interests in the broad area of retailer internationalisation. His ongoing work explores the internationalisation process of large, multinational, retail companies and the involvement of investment banks in this process. Much of his research has been funded by Sainsbury’s plc and the George Spencer Fellowship Trust, in conjunction with the British Shops and Stores Association (BSSA). Prior to moving to Aston Business School, Dr Palmer was employed as a Research Analyst at a small Cambridgeshire-based company in the software industry for a number of years. He was awarded his PhD from the Queen’s University, Belfast.

Dr Nicholls joined the Group in September from the University of Surrey. Prior to this he worked at Leeds Metropolitan University. Dr Nicholls’s research centres on marketing and business ethics, retailing, and children as consumers. He has a particular interest in Fair Trade and is currently writing a book on the subject for Sage (due 2004). Dr Nicholls has published in a range of journals, including the Service Industries Journal and the International Journal of Retail and Distribution Management. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Marketing Science and has spoken at a range of international, refereed, conferences. He was awarded his PhD from King’s College, London, and his MBA from the Said Business School, University of Oxford.

German Catalog Retailer RHENANIA wins inaugural INFORMS SOCIETY ON MARKETING SCIENCE Practice Prize Competition

DVDs of Presentations Now Available

by Gary L. Lilien, EMAC US Representative

The inaugural INFORMS Marketing Society Practice Prize competition crowned a winner at the 25th Marketing Science Conference at the Robert H. Smith School of Business in College Park, Maryland.   The competition was a rigorous one.  There were 31 high quality entries, each of which described both the work itself and the impact that work has had on the client organization.

It was satisfying, in this inaugural competition, to have the three finalists represent three continents!  And the winning entry represented the paper’s first author’s PhD dissertation research.  He completed that work and implemented it at the client organization, highlighting the mix of theory and practice that is central to much of the best work of our profession.

The winning entry, entitled “Optimizing Rhenania’s Direct Marketing Business through Dynamic Multi-Level Modeling (DMLM) in a Multi-Catalog-Brand Environment,” was written and presented by Ralf Elsner, Vice President of Marketing for Rhenania, Manfred Krafft of the University of Muenster and Arnd Huchzermeier of the WHU Otto-Beisheim Graduate School of Management.   Mr. Frederik Palm, the firm’s CEO, flew from Germany to Maryland to participate in the competition and receive the award alongside the winning team.

Rhenania, a German direct mail order company, used the model to answer the most important direct marketing questions: when, how often, and to which people in the customer base should the company mail.  The uniqueness of their approach is first, that it dynamically evaluates customers evaluated based on their past purchase history; and second, that it derives a threshold level of sales per customer needed to maximize profits in mailing campaigns over time and across multiple customer segments.   The approach was so effective that in a relatively short period of time after introducing the model, Rhenania acquired two of its major competitors, including a subdivision of the Springer Publishing Company that dwarfed it in size

The new ISMS Practice Prize is awarded for outstanding implementation of marketing science concepts and methods. The methodology must be sound and appropriate to the problem and organization. The work should have a significant, verifiable, and quantitative impact on the performance of the client organization. (Note that any work completed in recent years is eligible; prior publication of the work does not disqualify it.) 

From amongst the 31 entries, the judging panel, comprised of Ed Brody, Abbie Griffin,  Arvind Rangaswamy Jorge Silva-Risso, Joel Steckel, Steve Shugan with Gary Lilien serving as Chair, selected three finalists who made outstanding oral presentations of their work at the Conference in Maryland.

The two other finalists were:

• " Defending Market Share Against a New Entrant"  by John H. Roberts, Charles J. Nelson, and Pamela D. Morrison whose client organization was the Australian telephone company Telstra and
  
• “Will It Ever Fly? Modeling the Takeoff of Really New Consumer Durables" by Joseph A. Foster, Peter N. Golder and Gerald J. Tellis whose client organization was Whirlpool.

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.   The DVD also includes the powerpoint presentations that the finalists used.
 
For details on how to obtain copies of these outstanding presentations see 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.  

The Practice Prize Competition will be held again in 2004 at the Marketing Science meeting in Rotterdam June 24-27.   Look for a forthcoming announcement or contact Gary Lilien at GLilien@psu.edu for submission details.

On September 1 2003, the Marketing Group at the Birmingham Business School have been joined by Dr Helen White from Cranfield. Stan Paliwoda steps down as Marketing Group Leader and as Head of Department effective July 31 when he takes study leave until January 1st. Dr Chris Hackley is to be our Marketing Subject Group Head.

Graham Hooley, Professor of Marketing at Aston Business School and President-elect of EMAC, has been appointed Senior Pro-Vice-Chancellor of Aston University. The post is equivalent to Vice Principal or Deputy Vice-Chancellor in other countries.

Graham said: "After working for over 10 years in the Business School, I was pleased and honoured to be asked to work with the Vice Chancellor in developing and implementing the strategy for the university as a whole over the next few years. It has clearly been recognised that marketing can play a major role as a driver of change in organisations - even universities. It's going to be a fun few years putting into practice all that I have been preaching in MBA lectures for the last decade!".

Adamantios (Diamantis) Diamantopoulos, currently Professor of Marketing and Business Research at Loughborough University, England, has been appointed Professor of International Marketing at the Faculty of Economic Sciences, University of Vienna, Austria.

Diamantis will be taking up his new post in February 2004 and looks forward to joining his old friend and colleague, Bodo Schlegelmilch, in the beautiful city of Vienna (Bodo already holds a similar position at the "competition", i.e. the Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration). Upon hearing the news, Bodo commented: Vienna will never be the same again!.