August 10, 2006
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Press Contact: Bob Donath, bob Donath & Co. 914-522-3637 bobdonath@earthlink.net
ISBM contact: Dr. Gary Lilien; 814-863-2782 glilien@psu.edu

Editors: Interviews with Dr. Gary Lilien can be arranged directly with him at 814-863-2782 glilien@psu.edu

ISBM Proposals Bridge Business vs. Academic Gap

CHICAGO — To promote high-quality academic research with strong practical value for business-to-business marketing executives, the Institute for the Study of Business Markets (ISBM) awarded a total of $100,000 in extra funding support to eight research proposals competing during ISBM’s Second Biennial Academic Conference, August 3 and 4 at the Kellogg School of Management’s downtown campus.

Entitled “Thinking Big, Thinking Different: Contributions and Challenges in B-to-B Research,” ISBM’s conference dwelled on the field’s information needs, which generally are underserved by the academic community. Speakers on both sides of the fence stated their perspectives on business-to-business companies’ major information requirements and the academic research community’s output. A panel of judges evaluated 22 proposed projects accepted into the competition, giving equal weight to academic merit in furthering marketing knowledge and the usefulness of that knowledge to actual business marketers. Bridging what is often a gap between academic rigor and real-world marketing relevance is a key part of ISBM’s mission and those of its four conference co-sponsors.

Of three finalists which will receive at least $15,000 in additional funding from ISBM, the proposal judged best was, “Understanding the Effects of Marketing Contacts on Buyer-Seller Relationships.” Its authors, who will receive another $10,000 or more in support, are Professors V. Kumar and S. Sriram of the University of Connecticut, Pradeep Chintagunta of the University of Chicago, and doctoral student Anita Luo at the University of Connecticut. They plan to study how business marketers can best allocate their limited marketing communications and sales resources among customers with different needs and buying propensities.

ISBM, headquartered at Penn State’s Smeal College of Business, is a research center global in scope devoted to improving the practice of business marketing by its 60 corporate members, and promoting academic study in the field worldwide. ISBM’s Academic Conference co-sponsors were:

• Northwestern University’s Center for Research in Technology and Innovation, which contributed additional support funding.
• The Marketing Science Institute (MSI), located in Cambridge, MA, which supports programs in business-to-consumer and business-to-business marketing.
• The Center for Business and Industrial Marketing (CBIM), located at Georgia State University, in Atlanta.
• The Zyman Institute of Brand Science, based in Atlanta at Emory University.

Five other research proposals earned Silver Medalist awards from ISBM, receiving at least $5,000 each in support. Judges awarded another $5,000 minimum funding to the two proposals deemed the best of the five. (See the list of Finalists and Silver Medalists at the end of this article.)

ISBM also awards financial support each year to B-to-B marketing Ph.D. students whose dissertation proposals similarly combine academic rigor with business relevance.
Defining Business Needs
The conference featured the industry research priorities deemed by ISBM and MSI—posted on their Web sites at isbm.org and msi.org—the most significant information needs of manufacturers and service firms marketing to business and institutional buyers. According to ISBM, its biennial survey of business and academic experts cites improved knowledge of customer needs, market segmentation, and value creation as top research priorities for at least this year and 2007. More effective strategies for competing globally, mastering analytical marketing tools, and achieving more growth from new products are also critical areas requiring more research, ISBM reports. B-to-B concerns at MSI are very similar.

In addition, two chief marketing officers from leading B-to-B companies addressed the conference to “challenge” academe.

Emphasizing the need for better measurement tools, Anil Menon, Vice President of Marketing and Strategy for IBM’s Systems and Technology Group, insisted, “Marketing will never become a powerful function until it becomes accountable.” He cited three key issues on his list: better understanding the downstream customers of customers; recognizing the emotional side of buying decisions; and better evaluation of marketing communications because “ad agency metrics don’t work.”

Vivien Joklik, Vice President Worldwide for Marketing and Order Fulfillment at John Deere’s Commercial & Consumer Equipment Division, cited her key concerns, issues that also matter to many business marketers. Innovation and successfully marketing new technologies, particularly through Deere’s critically important dealers, top her list. Setting prices that best balance profit for the company and dealers, and successfully adding services to the venerable Deere brand name are other issues demanding more market and process knowledge at her firm, she said.
Overcoming the Gap
Although business-to-business marketing often differs from the techniques of selling products and services to consumers, B-to-B is as complex and sometimes more so than B-to-C. Long selling cycles, powerful customers, high-risk investments, multiple decision makers, and tough decisions in engineering, pricing, and relationship management combine to make B-to-B an especially robust but challenging field for academic inquiry.

Limited amounts of data from relatively small numbers of customers make that staple of consumer product marketing, traditional survey research, much trickier in B-to-B. That is often daunting to doctoral students, the marketing field’s future professors, who frequently prefer the comfort of working with familiar products they themselves might buy and vast pools of consumer data amenable to statistical modeling.

As a result, B-to-B doesn’t get its fair share of academic research even though B-to-B transactions account for about half of U.S. gross domestic product; B-to-C-related articles in the top marketing journals outnumber B-to-B articles by more than four-to-one, according Prof. Gary Lilien of Penn State, ISBM Research Director and head of the Academic Conference. ISBM attempts to right that imbalance with incentives such as its proposal funding and numerous conferences and corporate programs bringing together academic researchers and the 60 major corporate members of ISBM.

Contact addresses:
Institute for the Study of Business Markets
484 Business Building
The Pennsylvania State University
University Park, PA 16802-3603

Bob Donath & Co.
PO Box 1458
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2006 ISBM Academic-Practitioner Challenge Winners

Finalists:

(Outstanding entry) “Understanding the Effects of Marketing Contacts on Buyer-Seller Relationships,” a study of how business marketers can best allocate their limited marketing communications and sales resources among customers with different needs and buying propensities.

• V. Kumar, University of Connecticut
• S. Sriram, University of Connecticut
• Pradeep Chintagunta, University of Chicago
• Anita Luo, doctoral student at the University of Connecticut

“Multinational Innovation: Country Location or Firm Culture?” a study of multinational corporations to determine the most critical drivers of research and development activity outsourced to country subsidiaries.

• Gerard Tellis, University of Southern California
• Rajesh Chandy, University of Minnesota
• Jaideep Prabhu, Imperial College

“Assessing Value Creation at Business Trade Shows,” determining how attendee search behavior affects the value that visitors, exhibitors and exhibition organizers receive from major trade shows.

• Srinath Gopalakrishna, University of Missouri

Silver Medalists:

(Outstanding Silver Medalist) “Exploring Marketing-Sales Integration: The Role of Mindset Differences,” a study of how differences between sales and marketing personnel influence cooperation and conflict between the marketing and sales functions.

• Barton A. Weitz, University of Florida
• Jun Xu, doctoral student at the University of Florida

(Outstanding Silver Medalist) “Managing Knowledge and Learning in B2B Marketing,” a study of how companies can maximize business marketing learning in their organizations.

• Christine Moorman, Duke University
• Mitchell J, Lovett, doctoral student at Duke University

“The Development of Trust and Commitment in Asymmetric Buyer-Seller Relationships: An Experimental Study,” a study based on gaming experiments to ascertain factors that influence how a relatively powerful relationship partner interacts with a relatively weaker partner.

• Qiong Wang, Pennsylvania State University
• Barton A. Weitz, University of Florida

“The Channel Health Index: A Metric to Capture the Motivation of Business-to-Business Channels of Distribution,” a study to develop a new metric for tracking resellers’ motivation to support a manufacturer’s brand, enabling better channel management at company and industry levels

• David I. Gilliland, Colorado State University and Aston University
• Stephen Keysuk Kim, Iowa State University
• Timothy Curran, CEO of the Global Technology Distribution Council

“R&D and Marketing Competences, Product Innovation, and Financial Performance,” a multi-company study to determine which firm characteristics contribute to superior new product and financial performance.

• Erwin Danneels, Worcester Polytechnic Institute