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Interview with Executive Director Russell Winer

Russell S. Winer began a two-year appointment as MSI’s Executive Director in July. In this role, he oversees the quality and content of MSI-sponsored research, and facilitates the matching of research interests between MSI’s corporate members and academics from universities around the world. He succeeds Dominique Hanssens of UCLA.

Winer comes to Cambridge from New York City, where he is the William Joyce Professor of Marketing at the Stern School of Business, New York University. He has also been on the faculties of Columbia and Vanderbilt universities and the University of California at Berkeley, and has been a visiting faculty member at MIT, Stanford University, and Cranfield School of Management (U.K.), among other schools.

Although he has published on a number of topics, he is particularly interested in modeling consumer choice, psychological aspects of price, and interactive marketing using the new digital media.

Winer’s involvement with MSI goes back to 1992, when he began a six-year term as an Academic Trustee. In 2005, he authored Pricing, a research monograph in MSI’s Relevant Knowledge series. He has also received MSI funding for several projects.

He is the author of three books, Marketing Management, Analysis for Marketing Planning, and Product Management, and has written numerous papers on topics including consumer choice, marketing research methodology, marketing planning, advertising, and pricing. He is past editor of the Journal of Marketing Research and the Journal of Interactive Marketing, the co-editor of the Review of Marketing Science, an associate editor at the International Journal of Research in Marketing, and he is on the editorial boards of the Journal of Marketing, the Journal of Marketing Research, Marketing Science, and Marketing Letters.

He received a B.A. in economics from Union College and an M.S. and Ph.D. in industrial administration from Carnegie Mellon University.

Below, he discusses his views on marketing and MSI, and his goals as executive director.

MSI: Have marketing issues changed much since you were an Academic Trustee in the 1990s?
RW: The basic issues in marketing—what we call the four Ps—are the same: price, communications (promotions), distribution channels (place), and product-related issues such as branding and design. The big change has been the impact of technology. This has changed the marketing manager’s job and the nature of what is going on every day in marketing. Feedback to managers about whether they’re doing a good job is much quicker. Back in the ’60s and ’70s, it took a few months to learn what your market shares were. Now you can learn day by day. For better or for worse the information is more timely, and the feedback you’re getting from customers is much, much faster. This is, of course, reflected in the theme of the current MSI research priorities, “The Connected Customer.” I expect that the impact of technology in areas such as the rapid expansion of new digital media will also be reflected in the next set of priorities which will be announced in mid-2008.

The question is, how do you manage customers who have lots of information and talk to each other? Our conference in December (“Engaging Communities for the Company and the Brand”) is one manifestation of that question. At this conference, speakers from academia and industry will discuss both company-managed and “organic” communities, the latter resulting from customers themselves organizing to provide feedback to companies. Another is our February 2008 conference (“Leveraging Online Media and Online Marketing”). Integrating the new media with the “old” media (e.g., TV) will obviously be on the agenda there.

Can you discuss some current MSI research initiatives?
I'm particularly interested in the work we’re doing to match up researchers and companies who may be willing to share data. It’s not a simple process. First, we have to identify companies and data that will provide sufficient value so that the resulting research will actually break new ground in some area. Then there are internal hurdles within companies to get permission to make sensitive data available for academic research. In a several-thousand-personnel company, finding the appropriate person who has access to data is complicated. And there are always technical issues.

Despite the difficulties, I think MSI has a very important role in helping academics gain access to member company data and access to executives in member companies. I’m hopeful that we will develop some good models for this process.

Another initiative I’m excited about is our research competition, “Marketing Strategy Meets Wall Street.” There’s been a great response, and we have received about 35 research proposal submissions. A positive side effect of this initiative is that many of the proposals are co-authored with finance and accounting faculty members—making this initiative truly interdisciplinary.

The Wall Street initiative is a great example of what MSI has done well in the past: gotten out in front of a topic, put our resources behind it, and then disseminated a set of funded studies. Brand equity, market orientation, innovation—these are areas where MSI’s attention and support at nascent stages essentially defined the research agenda and then moved it forward.

The Wall St. initiative addresses the critical question of marketing productivity. It dovetails well with what’s going on at the CMO/CEO level. Instead of looking at the effects of marketing advertising on improving attitudes or repositioning, we’re taking it to the next step—or even two steps further—and asking, what’s it doing to our stock price? Is it increasing shareholder wealth?

What new efforts do you plan to launch?
My major effort will be to increase MSI’s visibility among academic institutions and researchers in the Pacific Rim—China, Korea, Singapore, and Hong Kong—and get more research proposals from those institutions.

There’s been significant growth in Western companies’ interest in doing business in the region and an increase in the number of business schools there. Over time, I hope to see an increase in the number of academics doing high-quality research and presenting it to our members. It’s going to take a number of years, however, for many faculty in the Pacific Rim area to consistently produce research that meets U.S. academic standards. MSI has a significant role to play in that we can help improve the quality of research coming out of those countries through our research proposal review process. Even if proposals are not funded, we give researchers useful feedback that ultimately improves the work. And when proposals are funded, a $5,000 research grant represents a lot to a researcher in India or China or Korea.

I think MSI can have sustainable impact on the quality of academic research in the region—not necessarily during my two-year appointment but over a period of five to ten years. This faculty development process is good for the academic world and for our member companies, since they will have a larger set of research to draw upon. Our MSI trustees are interested in the best work, not limited to the best American or best European work. How is consumer behavior or brand loyalty different in some of these countries? What are the differences in the decision-making process of B-to-B customers? How does this affect distribution channels?

Certain issues may be the same whether you're in China or in the U.S.—how to price a product appropriately, how to communicate that to customers, how to structure your sales force. But the execution may be quite different because of institutional differences or governmental restrictions. How do you do these things in a communist economy?

I will present the “MSI story” at a major conference in Shanghai in March and I hope to generate interest and questions about MSI. The downside is that we could then be overrun with research proposals—but that’s not a bad problem to have.

At some point, I would like MSI to have a cadre of “ambassadors” in these Pacific Rim countries to help further our research mission and, at some point, also develop relations with companies.

What are your overall impressions of MSI after a few months as executive director?
The leadership of the institution is strong. It’s gratifying to see that many companies have been with MSI for a number of years, and that we’re reaching out to new companies. I think that the health of the organization has never been better in terms of the number of member firms and those that want to join.

I’m excited to be here. The two biggest influences on my career are past MSI executive directors: Rick Staelin, who was my thesis advisor, and Don Lehmann, who was a colleague in my first job at Columbia. So it almost seems like destiny that I become the executive director at some point! MSI has had so many great people involved. This is a great job. A lot of people think it’s the best job in academia.