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Marketing MattersSummer 2008 • Vol. 2, Issue 2

Measuring the meaning of iconic brandsU of M researcher develops brand iconicity scale

What does it mean when we callbrands like Coca-Cola, Nike,

Kodak, and Cheerios “Americanicons”? Does iconicity translate to

cross-culturalbrand equity?How can compa-nies make themost of theirfamous brandswhen movinginto new mar-kets? AssistantProfessor CarlosTorelli wants to

answer these questions throughresearch that defines and measuresbrand iconicity and its effects onconsumers world-wide.

Torelli’s research with colleaguesChi-Yue Chiu of the University ofIllinois at Urbana-Champaign, HeanTat Key of the Guanghua School ofManagement at Peking University,and Carlson School PhD studentNelson Amaral reinforces the ideathat iconic brands carry aheavy symbolic load forconsumers, whofrequently rely on brandsto communicate theiraspirations to otherpeople. Brands thatresonate more closelywith diverse elements ofcultural knowledge andare easy reminders of cul-turally relevant values andbeliefs are more iconic.

A Newsletter of the Institute for Research in Marketing

continued next page

It turns out that I picked a goodyear for my sabbatical; I under-

stand the Minnesota winter wassevere—and it’s finally over! But, inmy absence, my colleagues at theInstitute and in the Department havecontinued to do amazing things.

I’d like to welcome three newAdvisory Board members: Christo-pher Luxon, Brand DevelopmentVice President at Unilever, the firstadvisory board member representing a firm headquartered outside the US; Marschall I. Smith, Senior VicePresident, Legal Affairs and GeneralCounsel, 3M Company (the firstattorney to join our board); and ScottWallace, Senior Vice President ofMarketing, G&K Services. In addi-tion, we would like to welcome Ed Dobbles of Supervalu, Pat Hughesof GfK Custom Research, and JulieMoore of Ecolab, who replace SusanParker, Jan Elsesser, and DerekMalmquist respectively. Our advisoryboard members serve as our brandambassadors, and I continue tomarvel at what a noteworthy group of corporate executives we haveattracted.

This newsletter highlights facultyand PhD student accomplishments,recent faculty hires Vladas Griskevi-cius and Joseph P. Redden, theInstitute’s recent Carlson on Metricsconference, and a new feature, “Askthe Expert.” In our inaugural piece,Professor Jane Ebert gives advice onconsumer decision making and thetiming of product launches.

Letter from theDirector

Carlos Torelli

To examine these landmark brands,the researchers developed a BrandIconicity Scale (BIS). Torelli explainsthat devising an iconicity metricallows researchers “to compare applesto apples,” by singling out brands withsimilar scores for comparison. Usingthe BIS may even reveal techniques toboost and leverage this importantfacet of brand equity in global mar-kets and multicultural environments.

In initial studies, Torelli finds thatalready likeable brands can increasetheir inconicity scores by strengthen-ing their associations with importantcultural values and raising the visibil-ity of those correlations for testsubjects. “Consumers use iconicbrands to manage their social iden-tity,” Torelli says, “and, in turn, theyuse social information to judge theiconicity of brands. We’re offering aframework for understanding theimpact of cultural meanings andidentity goals on consumers’ brandperceptions so that companies are

better able to managebrands both at homeand abroad.” As Torelliexpands his work in thisarea, he hopes to usethe BIS to helpcompanies evaluatetheir high-profilebrands and findcreative, successful waysto export them into newcultural marketspaces.

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A s knowledge creators, academicsare often the first to find effective

strategies and cutting-edge essentialsfor the problems marketing profes-sionals face. But in a crowded market-place, communicating these newfindings is often a time-consumingprocess. A leader in marketing researchand education, the American Market-ing Association has created theirKnowledge Coalition to supportresearchers and practitioners in theirhunt for just-in-time topics, innovativeinformation, and effective delivery.

Co-chaired by the Carlson School’sMichael Houston, Ecolab-Pierson M. Grieve Chair in International Pro-grams and associate dean of interna-tional programs, and Jeff Hunter, Con-sumer Insights Director at GeneralMills and a Carlson School alum, theCoalition is sponsoring a knowledgedevelopment initiative through whichmarketing thought leaders will selecttimely topics in marketing, audit thecurrent literature, and identify knowl-edge gaps and areas for future research.

American Marketing Association forms knowledge coalitionA respected leader in the discipline is building bridges to tackle

marketing’s top topics.

Director, continued

Ask the Expert

Additionally, I’d like to bring yourattention to the Save the Date noticefor our upcoming Forum on InnovationDrivers and Impediments. We have anillustrious panel for this exciting Julyevent. I hope you enjoy reading aboutall that is going on in the marketingdiscipline at the Carlson School. Tolearn more about the Institute forResearch in Marketing, includinginformation on our speakers’ series,conferences, and faculty research,please visit carlsonschool. umn.edu/mar-ketinginstitute.

Best wishes,

Akshay R. RaoCo-Director, Institute for Research in MarketingGeneral Mills Chair in Marketing

The first topic the AMA has chosenfor exploration is marketing mixresource allocation. The marketingmix has been widely studied in thepast, but is changing quickly with theintroduction of new media, giving theAMA an opportunity to create freshideas on a familiar topic. The firstdeliverable of the initiative, a tradepaperback on marketing mix resourceallocation and planning, co-edited bySouthern Methodist University profes-sor Roger Kerin, a Carlson SchoolPhD alum, was published in April2008.

“Researchers and marketing profes-sionals are often working on pioneer-ing responses to the same marketplaceissues at the same time.” Houstonexplains. “Bringing their experiencestogether, the AMA can create andorganize a useful body of marketingknowledge as a visible demonstration

of our leadership in the field.” Theassets generated from each initiativetopic will be tailored to what will bestfurther the current understanding ofwork in that field, whether the endresult is a trade paperback full of help-ful strategies or a conference wherethought leaders can share problems,ideas, and solutions to their mostpressing puzzles.

Sustainability is one of the impor-tant issues the AMA will address.Marketing managers and CMOs arestarting to ask how they can study andleverage this pressing issue at theircompanies. Houston says, “Framingand organizing sustainability and thedimensions of marketing’s role withinit—whether it’s driving concernswithin companies or brand equity—isthe biggest challenge for the AMA.”The sky’s the limit—and in this case,even an inspiration—for the AMA’sapproach to sustainability.

Through the creation of brandedresearch on current marketing topics,the AMA and its Carlson Schoolcontemporaries are continuing theirmission to improve, promote, andsupport marketing, both as a disciplineand a practice.

Keep Your Promises!

Assistant Professor Jane E. J. Ebert Shares Research FindingsA social psychologist by training, Ebert has made a career out of studying consumerdecisions that involve the future. Her most recent paper, “The Fragility of Time:Time-Insensitivity and Valuation of the Near and Far Future,” with Drazen Prelecof MIT’s Sloan School of Management, was published in the September 2007 issueof Management Science. We caught up with Ebert to ask:

Q > In your experience, what’s a practical way that companies can make decisions inthe marketplace that take into account buyers’ preferences about the future?

A > Marketers know that consumers typically dislike waiting for productsinstead of getting them immediately. Waiting a month for a release vs.getting it today doesn’t go over well. But, research shows that consumersrarely care about a similar wait time in the future—such as waiting twomonths vs. three months for a new product to come out. This observationhas many implications for marketers. For example, when introducing a newproduct, managers should avoid making promises they can’t keep. From theconsumer’s point of view, promising a product in three months, then delay-ing the release past that date, is far worse than an initial announcementcommunicating a conservative product release date. It’s better to underpromise and over deliver on the timing of a product launch.

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As budgets tighten at companiesaround the globe, executives are

looking to their marketing teams foraccountability, hoping to learn the truevalue of marketing actions. Chief Mar-keting Officers, in fact, frequently citeproving the value of marketing to oth-ers within their firms as their greatestchallenge. The absence of commonlyagreed-upon metrics to measure thesuccess of marketing actions is a press-ing problem confronting practitioners.

Carlson on Metrics, the Institute forResearch in Marketing’s third annualconference, brought together practi-tioners and academics from around thecountry to discuss the latest thinking inacademia and industry on marketingmetrics in five broad, thematic areas.Conference presenter Cesar Brea ofMonitor Group reported that he wasimpressed with the “balanced mix ofperspectives—top marketing researchand analytics executives from some ofthe world’s leading brands combinedwith leading academics in the field andleavened with some trusted advisorswith deep roots in the business and theresearch and data sets to show forthem.”

This two-day, 14-session conferencefeatured marketing experts from theUniversity of Minnesota’s CarlsonSchool, Harvard Business School,UCLA’s Anderson School, and theUniversity of California at Davis, aswell as industry leaders from MonitorGroup, American Airlines, Wells Fargo,GfK Custom Research North America,General Mills, 3M, Cisco Systems,Kraft Foods, CVS Caremark, United-Health Group, Carlson Marketing, andMillward Brown—several of which are

Institute AdvisoryBoard membercompanies.Considering theillustrious roster,session chair andboard memberPatricia D. Hughes,GfK, commentedon both the highquality and the candor of the speakers,noting that “they seem far less guardedon the content at the university than atindustry events.” This free-flow of ideasand information made Carlson onMetrics a valuable gathering.

Creating effective metricsThe Anderson School’s Dominique

M. Hanssens kicked off the conferencewith a discussion of the long termimpacts of marketing spending, arguingthat “the long run” has no fixed end-point and smart marketers ensure thatsingle marketing actions pay for them-selves. Firms can get permanent liftfrom a temporary action, Hanssenspointed out, making those promotionspotentially effective in both the shortand long-term. Linda Vytlacil of Carl-son Marketing expanded on Hanssens’theme, looking at brand health metrics,customer perceptions and behavior, and the drivers of consumer loyalty,engagement, and relationship strength.Vytlacil focused, specifically, on CarlsonMarketing’s RSx relationship strengthmetric and their proprietary researchseries, Carlson Relationship Builder.The program explores the role ofmarketing efforts in building customerrelationships and those relationships’roles in driving business results. JamesS. Henney of Wells Fargo presented onevaluating the business of impact ofbrand perceptions focusing on theimpact and outcome. Rounding out thesession, Gordon Wyner of MillwardBrown spoke on the measurement ofmarketing effectiveness beyond justROI.

Leveraging dataOnce they have good data, how can

practitioners make the most of theirmetrics? This afternoon session linked

rich customer data to best practices oneverything from pricing strategies tomarketing communication develop-ment. Adrian Sosa of CVS Caremark, in particular, knows how to manage a wealth of customer information; with approximately 1 in 6 Americanconsumers enrolled, CVS/pharmacy’sExtraCare is the largest retail loyaltyprogram in the U.S. Citing ExtraCare as “the biggest differentiator for CVS,”Sosa discussed the company’s process to leverage this enormous database forswift and rigorous tests of marketingoffers. Harvard’s Sunil Gupta took theconsumer focus to the web, presentinghis more recently developed model fordetermining the customer lifetimevalue of “free customers” in user-to-usermarkets such as Monster and eBay.David Krajicek of GfK CustomResearch North America introducedthe subject of practical metrics in link-ing consumer data to business metrics.The University of Minnesota’s MarkBergen closed Thursday’s sessions witha presentation on his decades ofresearch on pricing, an often-over-looked strategic asset.

Optimizing outcomesIn presentations highlighting adver-

tising budgeting and allocation andmulti-channel marketing optimization,Prasad Naik of the University ofCalifornia, Davis, and Brea consideredmetrics as corporate planning tools.Their Friday morning presentationsemphasized the relevance of wide-ranging data for marketing profession-als from top executives—marketing’sadvocates within firms—to thecampaign organizers who select andmeasure the results of individual adver-tising efforts. While Brea commented

C O N F E R E N C E R E C A P

Carlson on Metrics

Robert Britton (American Airlines), Lisa L. Love (3M), andJane E.J. Ebert (Carlson School) discuss Metrics in aNew World.

Professor Mark E. Bergen addresses the conference attendees.

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Advisory Board Sherman L. Black, Senior Vice Presidentand General Manager, Executive ComputeSeagate Technology

Best Buy, Inc.

Vivian Milroy Callaway, Vice President,Center for Learning and ExperimentationGeneral Mills, Inc.

Ed Dobbles, Vice President of MarketingResearch and AnalyticsSupervalu

Diane Harper, Vice President,Customer/Channel–Insights Kraft Foods

James S. Henney, Senior Vice PresidentEnterprise Marketing–Customer InsightsWells Fargo

Jim Hield, Vice President of MarketingServicesCargill

Patricia D. Hughes, Managing Director,Consumer SectorGfK Custom Research, North America

Christopher Luxon, Brand DevelopmentVice President, Deodorants, North AmericaUnilever HPC-NA

Bryan Maach, Vice President, MarketResearch & AnalysisCisco Systems, Inc.

Julie Moore, Vice President, GlobalMarketing and CommunicationsEcolab

Jim Schroer, President and CEOCarlson Marketing

Marschall I. Smith, Senior Vice President,Legal Affairs and General Counsel3M

Scott Wallace, Senior Vice President,MarketingG&K Services

Kate Whittington, Group Manager, GuestInsightsTarget

Academic Representative to the Advisory Board

Robert Ruekert, Professor, Associate Dean for Undergraduate Programs

Institute for Research in MarketingStaff

Rajesh Chandy, James D. Watkins Chairin MarketingCo-Director

Akshay R. Rao, General Mills Chair in MarketingCo-Director

Rebecca D. Monro, Associate Director

Letta Wren Christianson, ProgramCoordinator

that “our technological reach seems toexceed our organizational grasp,” Naikgave concrete examples of managing aportfolio of branding efforts at thevenerable Ford Motor Company. TheCarlson School’s marketing departmentchair George John, a world-renownedexpert on channel partners, closed thesession with a presentation on guidelinesfor channel metrics.

Moving ForwardWith a panel discussion on the

Metrics of Growth, the Carlson School’sRajesh K. Chandy, General Mills’ JeffHunter, Kraft Foods’ Gregory Michaels,and UnitedHealth Group’s Tom Sullivantackled the role of metrics in helping orhindering growth and innovation, sharinglessons-learned and new guidelines forcreating metrics to pace and direct firms’initiatives. Then, following his presenta-tion on the use of marketing metrics toorchestrate a turnaround plan for Ameri-can Airlines, advisor to the chairmanRobert Britton joined the conference’sfinal session, a panel discussion onMetrics in a New World, alongside 3M’sLisa L. Love and the Carlson School’sJane E.J. Ebert. Ebert, also the sessionchair, presided over this exploration ofthe future of metrics, and Love andBritton addressed the challenges andopportunities involved in designing novelmarketing metrics to keep up with theever-changing, fast-growing world ofglobal marketing.

Delivering what Brea called the “rightcontent at the right time,” Carlson onMetrics proved a fantastic confluence of research and practice and a sociable,productive way to cap another year ofinnovative work on marketing at theCarlson School.

For more information on Carlson onMetrics please visit carlsonschool.umn.edu/ markinginstitute/metrics

Cesar Brea, Monitor Group Adrian Sosa, CVS Caremark

Board memberspotlightIn academic circles, the notion of

marketing as “just sales and adver-tising” was shed long ago. And any

MBA graduate(especially from the Carlson School)understands thatpricing, consumerbehavior, econom-ics, and eveninnovation onlyscratch the surface

of what marketing as a discipline canencompass. But when we heard that a lawyer from 3M was interested injoining the Institute for Research inMarketing’s advisory board, there was some head-scratching. However,Marschall Smith, senior vice presi-dent of legal affairs and generalcounsel for 3M, embodies marketingas a practice and the Institute’smission.

It is fitting that top managers at3M, a global innovation leader, see alogical connection between the gen-eral counsel’s office and an academicinstitute that focuses on marketing.Smith says, “Marketing facultyprovide a wonderful combination ofthe theoretical and the practical—they connect the two. Lawyers seekto connect all aspects of the company,as well as any issues that affectprofitability. We take the day-to-daybusiness of the company and combineit into a fluid business process.Marketing needs to be a part of that.”

Smith sees himself as a gathererand interpreter of information andbelieves that this is where the tiesbetween academic research and achampion brand like 3M arestrongest. “Researchers create newknowledge. 3M creates innovativenew products. The difference is that,at a university, there is time to stepback and ask questions, apply equa-tions, theorize, and come up with the answer—the psychology behind a problem. Being involved with theCarlson School and the Instituteallows me a moment to hear theoutcome and then bring it back to the company. That is a luxury I canput to work every day.”

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Center Stage

> The Marketing Department welcomes Assistant Professors Vladas Griskeviciusand Joseph P. Redden. Griskevicius earned his PhD in social psychology at Ari-zona State University and specializes in consumer behavior, including conspicuousconsumption and social influence. A prolific author, Griskevicius received the 2007Best Competitive Paper Award from the Society for Consumer Psychology. Redden,who received his PhD at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, isprimarily interested in satiation and repeated experiences, multiple categories, and complex pricing formats in decision making. Redden’s dissertation, which hasreceived considerable press, won the AMA’s 2007 John A. Howard Doctoral Disser-tation Award and was published in the Journal of Consumer Research (Feb. 2008).> Associate Professor and McKnight Land-Grant Professor Kathleen D. Vohs wonthe 2008 SAGE Young Scholars Award for early career achievements in social orpersonality psychology research. James D. Watkins Chair in Marketing Rajesh K.Chandy and Associate Professor Om Narasimhan won the American MarketingAssociation’s TechSig Best Paper Award for their August 2006 article, “FromInvention to Innovation: Conversion Ability in Product Development,” co-authored with Brigitte Hopstaken and Jaideep C. Prabhu and published in theJournal of Marketing Research.> Curtis L. Carlson Chair in Marketing Deborah Roedder John’s recent researchwith Carlson School PhD alum Lan Nguyen Chaplin on materialism and self-esteem in kids garnered international media recognition, including articles byReuters and Yahoo! News and even a piece on the Today Show. Roedder John is wellknown for her years of groundbreaking work on marketing and children.> Marketing Department PhD student Noelle M. Nelson, along with AssociateProfessor Kathleen D. Vohs and other co-authors, had her article, “MakingChoices Impairs Subsequent Self-Control: A Limited-Resource Account ofDecision Making, Self-Regulation, and Active Initiative,” published in the May2008 issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.> Assistant Professor Carlos Torelli and his colleagues received a grant from theRobert Wood Johnson Foundation to fund their research project, “CulturalVariability in Patient Responding to Survey Measures,” through December 2008.> Carolyn I. Anderson Professor in Business Education Excellence Mark E.Bergen and Associate Professor Om Narasimhan received excellence in teachingawards from the Carlson School’s MBA Class of 2008. They were named Best CoreFaculty and Best Elective Professor, respectively.

Marketing Moments

New AdvisoryBoard MembersEd Dobbles, vice president ofmarketing research and analytics atSupervalu, is a graduate of theUniversity of Wisconsin-Madison and 2004 Effie Award winner.

Patricia Hughes joined GfK CustomResearch North America in 1995 andnow serves as the managing directorof their consumer sector.

Christopher Luxon, Unilever’sbrand development vice president fordeodorants, North America, has beennamed one of the “Top 40 MarketersUnder 40” by Advertising Age.

Julie Moore, ’87 MBA, is vicepresident of global marketing andcommunications for Ecolab. Moore is an alum of both St. Cloud StateUniversity and the University ofMinnesota.

Marschall I. Smith, senior vicepresident of legal affairs and generalcounsel at 3M Company, holds a J.D.from the University of Virginia and anMBA from the University of Chicago.Smith has been with 3M since 2007.

Scott Wallace is senior vice presidentof marketing for G&K Services, aNorth American market leader inbranded identity apparel and facilityservices, and holds a marketing MBAfrom Cornell University.

and MEG, as well as response time andself-reported preferences to study choiceand consumer behavior. Because itemploys cutting-edge neuro-scientifictechniques, the paper will be accompa-nied by several commentaries fromleading experts in this technology.

A recently accepted paper by GeneralMills-Gerot Chair in Marketing GeorgeJohn, Lindahl Professor for Excellence inBusiness Education Arthur V. Hill, andCarlson School PhD alumni Xinlei Chenand Julie M. Hays examines service

Recent Carlson School PhD alum WilliamHedgcock’s dissertation-based paper“Trade-off Aversion as an Explanation forthe Attraction Effect: A functional MagneticResonance Imaging Study,” co-authored

with his advisor, GeneralMills Chair in MarketingAkshay R. Rao, has beenaccepted for publication inthe Journal of MarketingResearch. Hedgcock'sresearch utilizes brainactivation data from fMRI

guarantees in the Journal of MarketingResearch. The researchers developed amethod to evaluate the outcomes of theRadisson’s service guarantee program in a way that takes into account both themeasured characteristics (location,customer mix, etc.) of each hotel as wellas its unmeasured characteristics (e.g.,history) to create a reward system formanagers that is fair across locations.

Mark your calendar

Institute for Research in Marketing Carlson School of ManagementUniversity of Minnesota321 Nineteenth Avenue South, Suite 3-150Minneapolis, Minnesota 55455-0438

carlsonschool.umn.edu/marketinginstitute

Inside this issue:Find 2008 event information, new board members, and research highlights.

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For more information on the Institute for Research in Marketing, call Rebecca Monro at 612-626-7940 or email mktginst@umn.edu.

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U.S. Secretary of Commerce headlines July 28 CEO Forum on Innovation

The Institute for Research in Marketing is delighted to announce that Carlos M. Gutierrez,U.S. Secretary of Commerce, and Rajesh K. Chandy, James D. Watkins Chair and Co-Director of the Institute for Research in Marketing, will moderate a panel ofdistinguished leaders as they address Innovation: Drivers and Impediments. Panelists include 3M Chairman of the Board, President, and Chief Executive Officer George Buckley;Medtronic President and Chief Executive Officer William Hawkins; Carlson Chairmanof the Board Marilyn Carlson Nelson; and Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty. Thepanel will discuss innovation in today’s enterprises and economies, sharing their lessons andinsights on driving innovation and presenting their thoughts on how government policies can help or hinder innovation. This exciting event will be held at the Carlson School ofManagement on July 28, 2008. Visit carlsonschool.umn.edu/marketinginstitute/ceo for updates and to reserve a seat.