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Hokey Pokey and V Kumar Research Team win 2011-2012 Gary Lilien ISMS-MSI Practice Prize Award

The 2011-2012 Gary Lilien ISMS-MSI Practice Prize was awarded to V. Kumar and Vikram Bhaskaran (Georgia State University), Rohan Mirchandani (The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania), and Milap Shah (Co-Founder and Director, Hokey Pokey) for their work “Creating a Measurable Social Media Marketing Strategy: Increasing the Value and ROI of Intangibles and Tangibles for Hokey Pokey.”

The award was made December 9 at the Gala Dinner of the biennial conference "New Developments in the Practice of Marketing Science 2011-2012: Impact and Implementation,” co-sponsored by ISMS (The Informs Society for Marketing Science) and MSI (The Marketing Science Institute) and hosted by the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business at the Smith School’s Washington, D.C. campus.

The conference provided a forum for over 100 leading-edge practitioners and practical marketing scientists to share perspectives on developments in quantitative approaches to marketing problems.

Kumar et al were among three finalists who presented their work at the meeting. Their winning presentation described a project conducted at Hokey Pokey, a small, rapidly growing Indian ice cream chain. The study focused on how to leverage the influence of customers through social media so that the chain could identify which individuals would be most influential in generating the maximum buzz and sales for the firm’s products. The study then selected those individuals with a predicted maximum social media influence to maximize its sales growth via the social media campaign.

“This work—as well as that of the other finalists–represents the finest of what marketing scientists have to offer practitioners. Each finalist used advanced marketing science modeling approaches to help the client company improve its profits, some quite substantially," noted Practice Prize Committee chair Russell Winer, William Joyce Professor of Marketing, New York University.

The other finalists were:

“Category Optimizer: A Dynamic Assortment, New Product Introduction, Price-Optimization and Demand-Planning System” by Ashish Sinha (University of New South Wales), Anna Sahgal (Principal, AS Marketing International), and Sharat Mathur (SVP and Partner, SymphonyIRI Group), who developed a system that had a major impact on product planning, pricing and profitability at Beringer Blass Wine Estates.

and

“A Bidding Decision Support System for Profitable Search Engine Marketing” by Bernd Skiera and Nadia Abou Nabout (Goethe University) and Steffen Vogel, Director SEA, who developed a user friendly system to maximize the profitability of search engine marketing campaigns.

The Gary Lilien ISMS-MSI Practice Prize is co-sponsored by Penn State’s Institute for the Study of Business Markets, the European Marketing Academy and The Center for Excellence in Brand and Customer Management at Georgia State University.

Papers and reports on these marketing science implementations will appear in a forthcoming issue of Marketing Science. Videos of these presentations and of past finalists and winners are available at

http://techtv.mit.edu/collections/isms

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