We report on the finalists from the 2005 Informs Society for Marketing Science (ISMS) Practice Prize Competition, representing the best examples of rigor plus relevance that our profession produces.

The two reports and two articles (as well as a Commentary) that follow are the finalists from the 2004 ISMS Practice Prize Competition, representing the best examples of rigor plus relevance that our profession produces.

In 2003 the INFORMS Society for Marketing Science (ISMS) introduce and conducted its inaugural Practice Prize Competition. The reports and papers that follow are the finalists from that competition, representing the best examples of rigor plus relevance that our profession produces.

Development of products takes into account organized and controlled planning of changes of inner self and toward the environment. That means the creation of an active force, which should bring changes in other words, it should change the person who participates in the process of creation or in the consumption of the product. It tried to induce customers to purchase through methodologies and promotion strategies which stand to our sen'ice by the change in the way of thinking of the medical and pharmaceutical profession and users of helpful means. The input of marketing within the control of the outcomes, leaders techniques and promotion strategies by the production of helpful healthy means has a very big meaning.

The need to justify one's decisions is a signal characteristic of decision making in a managerial environment. Even chief executives must communicate reasons for their actions. Yet, despite a significant amount of laboratory research on the effects of accountability on decision making, few studies have attempted to assess what affects accountability might have outside the lab for actual managers. In this paper, we use as subjects actual members of the professional account, research, and creative staffs of several advertising agencies in an experimental simulation of an advertising copy meeting. We demonstrate that accountability effects in complex, managerial decision contexts diverge considerably from those found in the lab. In particular, we find that accountability does not always lead managers to emphasize the most “objectively” accurate information, but instead can also encourage emphasis on information which is socially acceptable to the manager's key “constituencies” (those to whom they feel accountable, see Tetlock 1991). The social constituencies of accountable managers within a single organization can differ significantly. For example, members of an advertising agency's account service or research departments are likely to favor the quantitative, analytical decision styles of their supervisors, while members of the same agency's creative department are likely to favor empathy and personal judgment. Requiring managers with different constituencies to justify their responses can cause “policy bolstering,” the tendency to favor a process of decision making particular to one's own constituency. Thus accountability may sometimes make it more difficult for a diverse group to reach a consensus, and may not have the desired positive impact on decision quality. In an experiment simulating an advertising copy meeting, we first solicited managers' private judgments of 12 ads, then presented them with research data and asked each of them to make numerical predictions of how much consumers would like each ad. The experiment manipulated the diagnosticity of the available research and the degree to which managers expected to be held accountable for their predictions. We used hierarchical linear regression to analyze the results. Hierarchical linear regression allows us to estimate simultaneously a within-subjects model capturing individual weighting coefficients for private judgment and research, and a between-subjects model of the effects of department membership and experimental conditions on these judgment-policy weights. This analysis also controls for the varying degrees of precision in the within-subjects estimates, as well as for correlations between the within-subjects weighting coefficients. Key Findings. 1) Accountability had different impacts on the weighting schemes of members of account services and creative departments. Accountable research/account staff weighed research more in making their predictions than nonaccountable research/account staff. Accountable creatives, on the other hand, actually weighed research less than did nonaccountable creatives. 2) Because accountability caused subjects to attend assiduously to the research, the weight given private judgment reflected whether the data was diagnostic of the problem at hand. Accountable subjects presented with low-diagnosticity research reacted by emphasizing private judgment more heavily. 3) Accountability increased confidence in predictions; this effect was not dependent on the accuracy of subjects' predictions. Managerial Implications. We provide several suggestions and observations regarding current managerial practices, which may improve the impact of individual accountability on decision making.

In this paper, we develop an analytical approach to modeling consumer response to banner ad exposures at a sponsored content Web site that reveals significant heterogeneity in unobservable click pr...

Trade shows are an important but under-researched component of the promotion mix for most industrial products. In this paper, we develop a three-stage model of trade show performance, relying on different indices of performance at each stage: attraction, contact, and conversion efficiency. We model the impact of preshow promotion, booth space, use of attention-getting techniques, competition, number and training of booth salespeople on the extent of attraction, contact, and conversion. The results from an empirical application using data from 85 firms that participated in a major trade show in 1991 suggest significant and different impact of these variables. In addition, we illustrate how the model can be used to evaluate trade-offs among different decision variables. Finally, we develop some general results implied by our model concerning the optimal allocation of trade show resources.

A time series cross-sectional analysis of 18 successful later entrants in 8 categories of consumer packaged goods over the period from October 1983 to January 1988 confirms previous empirical findings that, after correcting for differences in marketing effort, later entrants suffer a long-term market share disadvantage. New evidence of the penalties associated with later entry are found in statistical estimation of models of cumulative trial, first repeat, and subsequent repeat purchasing. Significantly lower asymptotic levels are found in both trial and repeat behavior. However based on this data, the rate of approach of later entrants to their lower asymptotic performance measures is either equal to or faster than early entrants and provides evidence of a compensating partial effect accrued by later entrants.

Due to the risk inherent in dependence on foreign oil, there is a social benefit in aiding the introduction of alternative energy sources into the market place. The Federal government has initiated a number of programs, including price subsidies, to help accelerate the market diffusion of new, alternative energy systems. We develop a model to investigate analytically the effects of a price subsidy over time on the rate of market diffusion. The model considers word-of-mouth effects and learning curve cost declines. Under a set of conditions that a new technology should be expected to meet before commercialization, the optimal subsidy level is shown to be nonincreasing in time. The related market price is shown to be closely related to the diffusion effect. If there is no such effect, the price to the customer is constant. If there is positive diffusion effect, price increases in time, while if market saturation causes demand to decline over time price decreases in time.

An accurate understanding of the structure of competition is important in the formulation of many marketing strategies. For example, in new product launch, product reformulation, or positioning decisions, the strategist wants to know which of his competitors will be most affected and hence most likely to respond. Many marketing science models have been proposed to identify market structure. In this paper we examine the managerial problem and propose a criterion by which to judge an identified market structure. Basically, our criterion is a quantification of the intuitive managerial criterion that a “submarket” is a useful conceptualization if it identifies which products are most likely to be affected by “our” marketing strategies. We formalize this criterion within the structure of classical hypothesis testing so that a marketing scientist can use statistical statements to evaluate a market structure identified by: (1) behavioral hypotheses, (2) managerial intuition, or (3) market structure identification algorithms. Mathematically, our criterion is based on probabilities of switching to products in the situation where an individual's most preferred product is not available. ‘Submarkets’ are said to exist when consumers are statistically more likely to buy again in that ‘submarket’ than would be predicted based on an aggregate “constant ratio” model. For example, product attributes (e.g., brand, form, size), use situations (e.g., coffee in the morning versus coffee at dinner), and user characteristics (e.g., heavy versus light users) are specified as hypotheses for testing alternate competitive structures. Measurement and estimation procedures are described and a convergent approach is illustrated. An application of the methodology to the coffee market is presented and managerial implications of six other applications are described briefly.