Marketing
About Our Marketing Faculty And Research
In every industry, whether the end-consumer is an individual or a business, the successful company is one which does its marketing well.
In recent years, Rice Business has gained international prominence through its innovative programs taught by world-class faculty that bring their groundbreaking research and unique experience to the classroom. This vibrancy is highlighted by the work of the marketing faculty group.
Marketing is the well-spring of all business activities that support happy and fulfilled consumers. It is the business discipline that shapes successful strategy, by taking an empathetic perspective of customers, and distinguishing a company’s products and services from others.
Here at Rice Business, our marketing faculty group embraces the multi-disciplinary, quick changing, “part-quantitative analysis, part-creative art” nature of marketing. We conduct impactful award-winning research that is published in the most prestigious marketing journals such as Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Consumer Research, Marketing Science and Management Science. Our research is also extensively covered by many major media outlets. In the classroom, we deliver rigorous, state-of-the-art courses that combine the latest developments in marketing practice with the theoretical grounding that is necessary to make considered and successful decisions. Together, we are truly dedicated to advancing marketing thought and practice, and training a new generation of marketing leaders.
On this website, you will find information about each of our faculty members including their biographies and current research projects, descriptions of courses, information about events such as our annual Marketing Symposium and Research Camp, and details regarding the various programs offered here at Rice.
I invite you to read on and learn about marketing at Rice.
Ajay Kalra
Herbert S. Autrey Professor of Marketing
Featured Research
Linear loyalty programs (e.g., buy 10, get one free) are popular in practice despite limited empirical evidence demonstrating their efficacy. The main challenge in studying these programs is that customers opt-in to them, making it hard to figure out if outcomes are driven by the kind of customers who join the program or by the program itself. Using a unique data set and advanced econometric methods, we find that a linear loyalty program reduced the likelihood of customers leaving the firm, while having little to no impact on frequency of visits or monetary spend. Overall, we found that customer value increased by 30% over a five year horizon due to the loyalty program.
Recent Publications
2022 Publications
- Piyush Anand and Clarence Lee (2022). “Using Deep Learning to Overcome Privacy and Scalability Issues in Customer Data Transfer,” Marketing Science(Forthcoming).
- Chung, Jaeyeon (Jae), Leonard Lee, Donald R Lehmann, Claire I Tsai, (2022). “Spending Windfall (“Found”) Time on Hedonic versus Utilitarian Activities,” Journal of Consumer Research (Forthcoming).
- Ying Bao, Mengze Shi and Ajay Kalra (2022). “Designing Product Development Contracts in the Presence of Managerial Lobbying,” Management Science (Forthcoming).
- Fernandes, Daniel, Nailya Ordabayeva, Kyuhong Han, Jihye Jung, and Vikas Mittal (2021). “How Political Identity Shapes Customer Satisfaction,” Journal of Marketing, (Forthcoming).
- Singh, Siddharth, Ravi Sen and Sharad Borle (2022). “Online Training of Salespersons: Impact, Heterogeneity, and Spillover Effects,” Journal of Marketing Research, vol. 59(1), pp. 230-249.
- Uzma Khan and Ajay Kalra (2022). “It’s Good to Be Different: How Diversity Impacts Judgments of Moral Behavior,” Journal of Consumer Research, Volume 49, Issue 2, August 2022, Pages 177–201.
2021 Publications
- Jung Youn Lee, Joonhyuk Yang and Pradeep K. Chintagunta (2021). “Commercial Success through Commercials? Advertising and Pay-TV Operators,” Journal of Marketing Research Vol. 58(5) 925-947.
- Mittal, Vikas, Kyuhong Han, Ju-Yeon Lee, and Shrihari Sridhar (2021). "Improving Business-to-Business Customer Satisfaction Programs: Assessment of Asymmetry, Heterogeneity, and Financial Impact," Journal of Marketing Research, 58(4), 615-643.
- Gopalakrishnan, A., Jiang, Z., Nevskaya, Y., and Thomadsen, R. (2021). “Can Non-Tiered Customer Loyalty Programs Be Profitable?” Marketing Science, 40(3), 508-526.
- Jung, Jihye, and Vikas Mittal (2021). "Political Identity and Preference for Supplemental Educational Programs," Journal of Marketing Research, 58(3), June, 559-578.
- Chung, Jaeyeon (Jae), Gita Venkataramani Johar, Yanyan Li, Oded Netzer, and Matthew Pearson (2021). “Mining Consumer Minds: Downstream Consequences of Host Motivations for Home-Sharing Platforms,” Journal of Consumer Research, Volume 48, Issue 5, February 2022, Pages 817-838.
- Gopalakrishnan, A., and Park, Y-H. (2021). “The Impact of Coupons on the Visit-to-Purchase Funnel,” Marketing Science, 40(1), 48-61.
- Chen, Yixing, Vikas Mittal, and Shrihari Sridhar (2021). “Investigating the academic performance and disciplinary consequences of school district internet access spending,” Journal of Marketing Research 58(1), February, 141-162.
Top Marketing Electives
Below are some of the most popular marketing courses.
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Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is a metric of burgeoning interest for firms, venture capitalists, financial analysts and marketers. In this course, students learn how to build powerful and predictive data-driven CLV models. Topics covered include valuing firm equity using customer data, using RFM segmentation for direct marketing, customer acquisition and retention, and measuring the impact of a loyalty program.
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This course is designed to offer you an overview of the major principles of persuasion. The emphasis will be on developing a marketing communications approach that will fit into a firms’ marketing program. The course will cover how to set effective communication objectives, decide what to communicate and how to develop a message execution approach.
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Study of the paradigm that success of a product lies not only in its acceptance by the end consumer but also in how it is priced and how it reaches the intended consumer, with emphasis on understanding and analyzing the issues, problems and opportunities characteristic of the channel relationship and of the various faces of pricing. Repeatable for Credit.
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The Brand Strategy course is designed to build on your first-year MBA marketing course and will explore the elements of brand strategy to build capabilities on brand management and how brands drive business strategy and long-term value: what it is, what it is not, how to manage, execute, measure and value.
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Students will learn the most common methods managers use to gain insight about customers and markets as well as the objectives/advantages/disadvantages associated with different research designs such as qualitative methods, surveys and experiments. Students will not learn specific analytic methods but rather how to design studies to yield valid results.
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Students focus on conjoint analysis, a state-of-the-art method for discovering consumer preferences. This framework enables a quantitative approach to new product design that encompasses analysis of market share, segmentation, targeting and positioning. In this project-based course, student teams design a set of new product concepts using conjoint analysis, analyze related survey data and present a data-driven strategic marketing plan for their chosen concept.
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This course introduces students to the communication skills and behaviors required for success in the field of consultative selling, including effective questioning, active listening, assessing client communication style and delivering persuasive presentations.
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This course provides an introduction to digital marketing and examines ways it should be implemented. In addition to learning fundamental constructs and principles, students will focus on tools and skills needed for setting goals, implementing campaigns and measuring success. Guest speakers and in-class exercises are used to provide insights and relevancy to this swiftly expanding area of marketing.
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This course examines the key issues in managing customer experience in customer-focused service organizations. Its learning objectives are to understand the customer decision journey framework, diagnose and solve problems with journey mapping, design a transformative customer experience, measure experience, and manage unforeseen mishaps and setbacks.
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The main purpose of this course is to expose students to the interactive process of analyzing and exploring enterprise data to find insights that can be leveraged for competitive advantage. We will apply analytical tools to data in order to learn how to discover patterns and associations in business data that would otherwise be ignored. We will understand the difference between supervised and unsupervised learning and learn how to select the correct tools for descriptive and predictive analytics.
Full-Time Faculty
Part-Time Faculty
Rice Business Wisdom
Rice Business Wisdom is our online ideas magazine that features faculty research.