Knowledge that Transforms

Marketing Science greatly benefited from the admirable and fastidious efforts of more than 200 different individuals who provided manuscript reviews last year. Beyond those individuals already recognized on the editorial board, the editor-in-chief and guest editors of Marketing Science are indebted to the many guest area editors and ad hoc reviewers who provided expert counsel and guidance on a voluntary basis. The following list acknowledges the contribution of guest area editors and ad hoc reviewers who served from January to December 2010. Finally, let us not forget to thank the authors. Marketing Science requires and receives outstanding submissions from many leading researchers and prestigious organizations.

Inofec, a small-to medium-sized enterprise in the business-to-business sector, desired a more analytic approach to allocate marketing resources across communication activities and channels. We deve...

This foreword and the subsequent four invited articles were commissioned by Eric T. Bradlow while Editor-in-Chief of Marketing Science. The foreword was written in four parts; each part covers a different aspect of the Workshop on Quantitative Marketing and Structural Econometrics. The workshop was cosponsored by Columbia Business School, Duke University, the University of California at Los Angeles, and the INFORMS Society for Marketing Science and was held at the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University in August 2010. The introductory section, written by Bradlow, covers why he commissioned these articles in the first place. In his section, Jean-Pierre Dubé discusses “going from good to great” in the structural econometrics area as applied to marketing problems. A section jointly written by Brett R. Gordon and Raphael Thomadsen (both co-organizers of the workshop) discusses the workshop itself and some important thoughts for those people doing “structural econometrics in the trenches.” Finally, co-workshop organizer Richard Staelin's section provides some perspective on both the workshop and structural econometrics as they relate to analytical models and empirical work for quantitative marketing researchers.

Many online shoppers initially acquired through paid search advertising later return to the same website directly. These so-called “direct type-in” visits can be an important indirect effect of pai...

I introduce the work of the finalists in the 2009–2010 ISMS-MSI Practice Prize Competition, representing once again the best combinations of rigor and relevance produced by marketing scientists. The winning paper is by a team from several German universities and represents a collaboration with Bayer AG on an important problem—allocating the marketing budget dynamically across countries, products, and the marketing mix. The other three finalists described projects involving a branding project for an Australian airline, Jetstar, based on a dynamic choice model; a new tool for differentiating Prudential's variable annuities from the competition; and a marketing communications model for a small, family-run European office furniture supplier, Inofec.

In “Online Display Advertising: Targeting and Obtrusiveness,” Avi Goldfarb and Catherine Tucker present an empirical investigation and discussion of consumers' reactions to obtrusive and targeted Internet advertisements. They find, among other things, that obtrusive advertisements when combined with targeting tend to generate no greater effectiveness in consumer response than either method used alone. Perhaps one of the most interesting findings in their results involves the authors' focus on privacy salience and its connection to advertisement presentation. This brief discussion of their work (1) highlights the importance of further research in line with the well-crafted privacy preference inquiries of Goldfarb and Tucker's study and (2) complements the authors' discussion regarding possible public policy implications with a legal discussion elaborating on existing legal grounds for liability and restrictions on advertising consumers perceive as privacy invasive.

In a very intriguing and groundbreaking study, Goldfarb and Tucker [Goldfarb, A., C. Tucker. 2011. Online display advertising: Targeting and obtrusiveness. Marketing Sci. 30(3) 389–404] show that online advertising targeting and obtrusiveness boost purchase intent independently, but not jointly. The authors rule out recall as an explanatory mechanism and provide preliminary evidence that the effect may be driven by privacy concerns. We comment on the substantive importance of this finding by discussing the psychological and economic implications of the effect.

In this note I overview the data selection and procurement process in the context of structural models. Data selection for structural models presents unique challenges because data and structure often substitute and because it is imperative to consider what information identifies causal effects of interest. I further discuss three types of field data on which to build empirical models: (i) data that are proprietary to firms, (ii) data that can come from the public domain, or (iii) data that can be purchased from private research firms, and I discuss the benefits and limits of each. I then detail a process for obtaining proprietary data and the potential pitfalls inherent in the process.

The commentaries on our work suggest several broader implications of our findings as well as a concern that we understate the size of the effect. In this rejoinder, we discuss our views on the regulatory implications, the implications for firm strategies, and the implications for our understanding of the underlying behavioral processes. We also acknowledge that our original calculation of $464 million in cost savings for industry is conservative. We conclude with a call for “privacy engineering” research that combines computer science tools with an understanding of consumer behavior and economics to improve marketing and economic outcomes while safeguarding consumer privacy.