How I Wrote This

Brett talks to Eva Ascarza about her paper “Retention Futility: Targeting High Risk Customers Might be Ineffective,” published in JMR in 2018. Eva is the Jakurski Family Associate Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. She is a co-founder of the Customer Intelligence Lab at the D^3 Institute at HBS, and she is an expert on customer management. Share your thoughts about th...

"Publish or perish” — it’s a maxim that we academics live by. But how does a paper become a publication? How do researchers take a rough idea and craft it into a draft? And how do they navigate the publication process, with all the bumps and bruises along the way? In each episode of “How I Wrote This,” marketing professors Brett Gordon and Karen Winterich speak to the authors of an academic m...

In Episode 4, Karen talks with Andrea Webb Luangrath and Joann Peck about their 2022 paper  “ Observing Product Touch: The Vicarious Haptic Effect in Digital Marketing and Virtual Reality ”. After Andrea developed the idea in a doctoral seminar over a decade ago, the project hibernated for a few years before she and Joann brought it back to life. Knowing the paper addressed a relevant question dig...

Joining Brett this month are Stephan Seiler (Imperial College London), Anna Tuchman (Northwestern University), and Song Yao (Washington University in St. Louis) to talk about their paper, “ The Impact of Soda Taxes: Pass-Through, Tax Avoidance, and Nutritional Effects,”  published in the Journal of Marketing Research in 2021. Soda taxes are a relatively new phenomenon, and this paper was among the...

In the second episode, join Karen Winterich’s interview with Maura Scott and Martin Mende as they talk about transporting a 600-pound robot through the streets of New York City to make realistic stimuli for their 2019 JMR paper, “Service Robots Rising”. When their paper was first rejected at another journal, they took the reviewer feedback seriously and substantially revised the paper to increase...

In the first episode, Brett speaks with Dina Mayzlin and Judy Chevalier to talk about their 2006 JMR paper, “The Effect of Word of Mouth on Sales: Online Book Reviews.” You’ll hear how a seemingly innocuous post-seminar question turned into this successful collaboration, which eventually landed them the 2011 O’Dell Award for making a significant long-term contribution to marketing.