Jonah Berger’s Invisible Influence is in the tradition of informative marketing books based upon behavioral research, think Dan Ariely, Sheena Iyengar, or Chip Heath. He concentrates on optimal distinctiveness and social influence. Some of the details people may know from elsewhere but all of which are interesting. Optimal Distinctiveness And Social Influence One of the…
Category: Academic Marketing
Ranking Business Schools’ PhD Programs
I am probably more positive about rankings than most professors. How then can we go about ranking business schools’ PhD programs? Rankings: An Apology For Not Being More Angry It is not that I don’t see the weaknesses of rankings. They have tons of problems. My view on ranking is, however, influenced by the fact that the…
Measuring The Impact Of Marketing On Wall Street
Bernd Skiera, and a couple of colleagues, have a paper that considers a relatively recent wave of research in marketing academia. They tackle event studies. These look at the impact of specified “events” on the value of a firm. Measuring the impact of marketing on Wall Street. Marketing Events Clearly marketers tend to concentrate on marketing events….
Smoothing Data
Excel can be a very useful tool. Though it cannot easily do the most advanced statistical tasks. Excell can tackle most everyday business analytics. Today we see how a business advisor discusses a range of challenges including smoothing data. Balanced Scorecards Ron Person shows how to produce balanced scorecards in a book that is packed…
Field Guide to Lies
Daniel Levitin has an very enjoyable and informative popular science book in his Field Guide to Lies. He surveys how we know what we know, and how we communicate it to others. To be fair not all of it is about lies, for instance, he discusses how data is collected. A lot of the problems he…
The Persistence of Academic Customs
Recently I was reading Max Weber’s thoughts on “Science as a Vocation” given in a lecture on November 7th, 1917. By science Weber means knowledge creation in the broader sense so pretty much all academics should be included as scientists. It can also tell us about the persistence of academic customs. The Persistence of Academic Customs There…
Teaching CLV Badly
Ex-Ivey PHD student and now University of Calgary professor, Charan Bagga, and I have just published an article. This focused on the teaching of CLV (Customer Lifetime Value). We surveyed the state of case-based teaching materials related to CLV and found them a pretty shoddy bunch. Teaching CLV badly seems to be the default way to teach…
The Secret Axis: Label Your Axis So As Not To Lie
Gary Smith’s advice on statistics, Standard Deviations, is a really useful and entertaining book. In this Smith points out a number of major problems with the way stats are used. Some problems arise from deliberate tricks played by researchers/managers describing data. Other problems arise through carelessness; the researcher/manager using the data doesn’t realize they are abusing…
The Red Queen And Implications For Best Practice
It is hard to spend any time at a business school without hearing the phrase best practice. We teach students best practice. Junior professors seek hints from senior folk on best practice. Even schools regularly go through bouts of benchmarking to see if they are adopting best practice. Best practice essentially is something that gets the most…
Lying With Statistics
While statistics can help us understand the world there is plenty of opportunity to abuse them to mislead. Darrell Huff wrote a short book that was first published in 1952 on lying with statistics. Some of the text shows its age (lots of male pronouns and references to gentleman) but many of the lessons remain applicable today. Reading Huff’s…