Stark and Freishat (2014) are pretty negative about student evaluations of teaching. To be fair the more you study evaluations the more problems you see. I agree that we have a problem with bias in student evaluations of teaching. Still many of the criticisms of evaluations, however, seem to be about the general problems of…
Category: Understanding Marketing
Measuring Research Quality
One of marketing academics’ favorite recommendations is to measure outcomes. Still, measurement problems make it hard for academics to take our own advice. Let’s give academics the benefit of the doubt and assume they genuinely want to measure their achievements. How then do we go about measuring research quality? Measuring Research Quality A major part…
The Flutie Effect
Brand building advertising invests money into creating goodwill with a customer. Without further spending such goodwill declines. There are other ways to create goodwill. For example, US universities do so through the funding of sports. Such funding has its payoff through things like the Flutie effect. The Flutie Effect Doug Chung looked at the impact…
Fairness and Channel Coordination
Fairness matters in life. People are motivated to achieve fair outcomes. (Although people are generally quicker to notice shares that are unfair to them than to other people.) Given business is a human social endeavor it shouldn’t be a huge surprise that fairness matters in business too. Adding fairness concerns to models of how business works…
A Call to Action
Jennifer Aaker and Andy Smith (with Carlye Adler) have a new book, The Dragonfly Effect. This is an interesting short book that is an easy read. The book is a practical guidebook to using social media to enact change. It contains lots of useful how-to lists. For instance, they highlight the need for a call…
Value-Based Marketing
In 2000 Peter Doyle started the abstract of his paper, Value-Based Marketing with the sentence. “Marketing has not had the impact on the boardroom that its importance justifies” (Doyle, 2000, page 299.) Doyle made a fair point. Marketing’s Lack Of Influence It is very common for academic marketers to bemoan marketing’s lack of influence. Many firms…
Canada’s Top Brands
Like a doughnut the survey in Canadian Business magazine that placed Tim Hortons as Canada’s Top Brand is enjoyable. That said, it is not necessarily the most nutritious thing in the world. What do we know about Canada’s Top Brands In 2014? Loving Tim Hortons We find out that Canadian’s love Tim Hortons’ coffee and…
Survey Methodology And The Future Of West Ham United
West Ham United, the English football (soccer) club I support, hasn’t seen much recent success. (Written in 2014, as I revise this in 2021 things are better). The fans, in a fine example of optimism bias, expect the team to win while playing with a certain élan. In 2011, after a disastrous few years, Sam Allardyce was…
Measuring Marketing In The Age Of Absolute Value
Itamar Simonson and Emanuel Rosen suggest that with greater access to information consumers can (and do) make much better purchasing decisions. They are, in effect, arguing that much academic work in marketing is too artificial when it shows decision-making problems. In the real-world consumers can solve problems that confound students in the laboratory. Too much choice can paralyze but this…
Making Your Future Self Happy
I’m traveling to my ten-year MBA reunion [written in 2014]. As such, it seems an appropriate time to consider how we predict the future. Ten years ago I would never have predicted that I’d be a marketing professor living in Canada [now in US]. Interestingly, I wonder whether I would even have wanted to become…
