Marketing Ph.D. Candidate Wins Best Doctoral Dissertation on Retailing
Storrs, CT (12/11/2007) - Marketing doctoral candidate Denish Shah recently won the 2007 Levy and Weitz Doctoral Dissertation Competition, sponsored by the Miller Center for Retailing Education and Research at the University of Florida. Denish receives an award of $2000 and will give a 10-minute presentation of his dissertation research at the AMA 2008 Winter Educators' Conference in February.
“Competition was extremely intense this year,” wrote Dr. Kristy E. Reynolds, Retailing SIG Chair and Bruno Associate Professor of Marketing at the University of Alabama’s Culverhouse College of Commerce.
Submissions were judged on importance and potential contribution of the subject to retailing; quality of conceptual development; feasibility and appropriateness of methodology; and creativity. Design aspects were also a particularly important role in the evaluation process.
PHOTO: Doctoral candidate Denish Shaw
An abstract of Shah’s dissertation appears below:
Retailers are typically concerned about sales performance of each stock-keeping unity (SKU) carried in its stores as it ultimately contributes towards the product category and overall store-level sales. Several managerial issues stem from this concern. This includes decision-making questions such as (a) Which SKUs should a retailer choose to stock on its limited shelves and in how many stores (in case of a retail store chain)? (b) On what marketing initiative(s) should the retailer focus to enhance the performance of each SKU? (c) To what extent can the manufacturer initiated marketing initiatives (such as advertisement) impact the SKU’s/brand’s sales performance in the store? (d) How to infer the success and hence stocking decision for new SKUs launched by the manufacturer?
To address these issues, it is important to recognize the fact that there is a strong interdependency between retailer stocking decision and consumer purchase. Our framework accounts for this phenomena by developing a demand-supply system that explicitly models the two-way relationship between retailer’s utility and consumer’s utility. Further, we delve deeper in the concept of consumer utility and decompose it into two separate components: (1) Product-line Attractiveness i.e. consumer utility due to SKU-specific factors such as price, promotion and product attributes and (2) Brand Preference i.e. consumer utility due to inherent brand preference and brand-related marketing such as advertisements. However, brand preference is inherently dynamic and unobserved. We address this challenge by estimating dynamic brand preference as a state-space model based on the Kalman filter algorithm.
Our methodology hopes to render substantive implications for both academicians as well as practitioners. From the academic research standpoint, our framework proposes to recover unbiased demand parameter estimates by addressing the endogeneity issue of product availability due to retailer stocking preference. This issue has been unresolved in virtually all marketing-mix model studies to date. From the practitioner standpoint, our study seeks to address important managerial questions raised earlier. Our framework is generalizable across any retailing context that entails marketing and stocking trade-off decisions across multiple SKUs and brands.
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