Marketing

Schools of Law and Business hold Joint Retreat to Promote Scholarship and Programming

Posted on by Brian Kelleher

kOn September 26, law school and business school faculty held a joint retreat at the UConn Law School in Hartford, Connecticut. Participants attended a variety of academic sessions on mutually interested topics, including dig data, financial markets and corporate governance, human rights and ethics, and sustainability. The lunch speaker was Kip Hall, Esq., a senior attorney at DLA Piper, who presented on the importance of understanding compliance for both law students and business students.

Approximately sixty faculty from both schools attended. Feedback was strongly positive and faculty reported that they gained useful contacts throughout the day. Marketing and business law faculty played prominent roles at the retreat, fostering common ground in the areas of big data, corporate governance, and international business. The goal of the retreat is to develop new programs that enrich the options for students while leveraging the considerable expertise of the two schools in joint initiatives.

Professional Selling Role-Play and Networking Event

Posted on by Brian Kelleher

lEvery semester, our exciting Professional Selling Role-Play and Networking Event facilitates conversation between our students and sales professionals. This fall, over 35 students in the Professional Selling course acted out sales calls with professional representatives from 9 PSL partner companies. During the initial round of sales calls, our students met with company representatives and engaged in 20 minute rounds of calls.  Students with the highest scores proceeded to the final round of the competition. During the final round, they engaged in a sales call in front of a panel of representatives. We are pleased to announce this year’s winners are Hannah Kirsch and Amar Singh.

UConn’s Marketing Department offers students the experience and training to excel in professional sales. The Program for Sales Leadership (PSL), provides interactive classes, sales competitions, student-run organizations, and accredited professional sales internships to give students experiential learning and insights on career development. PSL also emphasizes the critical thinking, communication, and data-driven analytical approaches that today’s leading businesses value.

This year, the PSL Role Play and Networking Event brought together our partner companies with over 80 passionate professional sales students to discuss sales careers and opportunities. If your company is interested in building an enduring relationship with PSL, please contact the PSL Program at psl@business.uconn.edu.

Research Seminar with Junhong Chu

Posted on by Brian Kelleher

Professor JuJunhong Chu - Seminar Speakernhong Chu from the National University of Singapore gave a research seminar on Friday, October 10 about “quantifying cross-network effects in online C2C platforms.” This research examines the phenomenal growth of Taobao.com, a key reason behind the largest-ever IPO by Alibaba Group in September. Taobao.com is an eBay-like consumer-to-consumer platform. Professor Chu’s analysis suggests a significant cross-network effect on both sides of the market: buyers and sellers. The installed base of either side of the platform has propelled the growth of the other side. However, the installed base of sellers has a much larger effect on the growth of buyers than vice versa. In light of the results in this study, Taobao.com has changed some of its policies to become more “seller friendly.”

Junhong Chu is an associate professor of marketing at the National University of Singapore Business School. She earned a Ph.D. in marketing and an MBA from the University of Chicago, Booth School of Business. Her research interests include structural modeling of consumer and firm behavior, two-sided markets, distribution channels, e-commerce, and retailing. Her research has appeared in Marketing Science, Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Marketing, and International Journal of Research in Marketing. She was a 2011 MSI Young Scholar.

Business Week Recognizes UConn Business Law Program as “Top Ten”

Posted on by Melissa Ferrigno

Business Week named the UConn Business Law program among the top ten undergraduate programs in the U.S. This ranking is based on survey responses from graduating seniors regarding their learning experiences in Business Law classes. Members of the Business Law faculty have repeatedly earned national recognition from their peers for their teaching methods and classroom mastery. Continue Reading

Frank Guardi: 2014 Graduate Accepts Digital Marketing Job

Posted on by Melissa Ferrigno
Frank Guardi '14 Photo
Frank Guardi ’14

Frank Guardi is a ’14 UConn graduate with a communication major and a business fundamentals minor. Guardi has accepted a position in IBM’s Marketing and Communication Department as a social business and social media specialist. His job responsibilities include monitoring social conversations, managing user communities, and social media platforms such as corporate blogs, Facebook, and Twitter, and designing and implementing social media campaigns.

With a focus on digital marketing and social media, Frank enrolled in Professor Jane Gu’s Digital Marketing class, and found the class very helpful in preparing for his planned career. As part of the class, Guardi learned how to conduct social monitoring and search engine optimization (SEO) as well as important social media frameworks such as the “engagement pyramid.” Taking the class got him up to date with the digital marketing activities of major companies, such as Google and Amazon. For his class project, Frank worked with five other students to develop an integrated digital marketing plan to market Cape Cod potato chips to the west coast.

As a student, Guardi worked to build his digital marketing credentials and interned with an MLB baseball team to manage its social media campaigns and with IBM’s external relations department. Guardi’s advice to students is to “start an internship early in their junior year or before entering senior year in the area or company they are interested in, and to start planning to job-hunt once they begin their senior year. The market is becoming more and more competitive. You have to get ready early.”

Guardi, a student athlete, is a member of the UConn football team. He admits, “Spending forty hours in training and maintaining a good GPA at the same time is not easy.” Nonetheless, this experience has sharpened his capabilities in time management, teamwork, social skills, and commitment, qualities that employers highly desire.

Guardi relocated to Austin, Texas for his new job in late May. “It is a fun city with a lot going on,” Guardi smiled. “I expect to stay active.”

Networking Reception Draws Students and Alumni

Posted on by Melissa Ferrigno

by Rachel Miller ’14

Rachel Miller '14 and Shan Lin, marketing Ph.D. student
Rachel Miller ’14 and Shan Lin, marketing Ph.D. student

NETWORKING. As a senior marketing major, this is a word I have become very familiar with over the past four years. Like other business majors, we are told that networking is one of the most valuable skills for business success. However, many times it is difficult to practice and become a “skilled networker” as a student. On February 10th, at the Alumni and Student Networking Reception, the Marketing Department provided students the opportunity to improve their networking skills.

Despite relentless winter weather, the event was a success, and the Wilbur Cross library was filled with marketing students and faculty members. Keynote speaker John Fodor, a UConn alum and the Executive Vice President of Sales & Distribution for the Capital Group/American Fund, related how he used his business skills to quickly come up with a new family vacation after his family’s Caribbean flights were cancelled by an erupting volcano. Many of us are familiar with the stress of planning family vacations, and he used this relatable topic as a platform to highlight the importance of being prepared with a “plan B,” whether it is for a family vacation or a business deal.

At a large university like UConn, it can sometimes be difficult and intimidating for students to talk to alumni and faculty one-to-one. However, these networking events are one of the best ways to transfer what we learn in the classroom to the “real world.” These networking events transform “networking” from a familiar term to a practiced skill.

Click here to see more photos from the event.

 

How to Navigate the Five Pathways of Corporate Legal Strategy

Posted on by Melissa Ferrigno

MIT Sloan Management Review (forthcoming)

Robert Bird. Co-author: David Orozco

CEOs, board members and executives are forced to navigate increased regulation, lawsuits, varying international legal regimes, and the greater prospect of liability due to stiffer legal penalties.  Top executives recognize that legal capabilities are a necessary element of long-term corporate success. A Financial Times study found that 24 percent of U.S. companies had lawyer-directors in 2000, and in 2009 that amount notably increased to 43 percent. Corporations generate tangible returns, such as higher stock market valuations, when they employ attorneys who serve as board members, and when top corporate officers have legal knowledge.

Paradoxically, the processes through which corporate legal departments provide competitive advantage remain poorly understood. The law is all too often viewed as a constraint on managerial decisions and is often perceived by executives as a source of costs. This prevailing cost perspective towards the law, while valuable, does not explain how leading companies employ their legal departments to secure long-term competitive advantage for the firm.

Robert Bird and his co-authors explain how viewing the law narrowly as a cost or compliance issue inevitably leads to foregone strategic opportunities, and introduce an actionable framework, the Five Pathways of Corporate Legal Strategy: avoidance, compliance, prevention, value, and transformation. These pathways should enable managers to think about the law strategically and identify value-creating opportunities, thereby creating long-term and sustainable value. Legal rules are not just a checklists to complete, but an opportunity to advance firm goals in a competitive business environment.

“I’m Moral But I Won’t Help You” – The Distinct Roles of Empathy and Justice in Donations

Posted on by Melissa Ferrigno

Journal of Consumer Research, (forthcoming)

William T. Ross, Jr. Co-Authors: Saerom Lee, Karen Page Winterich

Americans tend to think of donating to charitable causes as a moral, prosocial behavior, but understanding what makes people donate is not well understood. Professor Bill Ross and his colleagues examine how moral identity, defined as “how important being a moral person is” affects prosocial behaviors. Usually having a strong moral identity increases how much prosocial behavior the person engages in. However, sometimes individuals with a strong moral identity make lower donations to charitable causes. Four studies demonstrate that someone high in moral identity gives less when those whom they would be helping, the recipients, are seen by the potential donor as personally responsible for their plight, for example if they have AIDS because they shared hypodermic needles while taking illegal drugs.

Further analyses reveal that empathy and justice underlie these effects. Specifically, people high in moral identity increase donations to recipients who they view as not responsible for their plight out of empathy and decrease donations to recipients who they see as responsible for their plight because of justice concerns. Additionally and interestingly, people who are high in moral identity will donate to recipients who are responsible for their plight if donors are made aware of their own immorality, as it causes them have greater fellow-feeling, or empathy, for these recipients. Study results indicate that moral identity, empathy, and justice in communication programs are likely to affect donations.

The Relationship between Consumer Characteristics and Willingness to Pay for General Online Content: Implications for Content Providers Considering Subscription-based Business Models

Posted on by Nancy White

Marketing Letters (forthcoming)

Girish N. Punj.

“People hate, hate, hate to subscribe to things on the Internet” (Bill Gates, 2005)

Over the past decade, there has been a substantial increase in the demand for online content, but there has been little change in consumers’ willingness to pay for it.Continue Reading