• Are social coupons profitable for businesses?
• Can businesses influence social coupon profitability through their marketing actions?
• When countered with a loss, how can businesses recover the shortfall in profits from the coupon launch?
• How long will it take for businesses to recover the shortfall in profits from the coupon launch?

These answers shed new light on the ineffectiveness of social coupons in their current form in generating profits and driving business to the firms offering them. As a means to aid businesses in deciding on the choice of launching social coupons, we have developed a social coupon calculator that businesses can use to determine whether the campaign is going to result in a profit/loss and in the case of a loss, how soon can they recuperate the loss. The calculator is available here. The impact and relevance of this study is evident when it was featured on the CBS-Atlanta local news. The video can be seen here.

The Practice Prize is awarded for outstanding implementation of marketing science concepts and methods. Eligibility for this award includes adoption of research methods that must be innovative, sound, and appropriate to the problem and organization, and the work should have had significant, verifiable, and preferably quantitative impact on the performance of the client organization. The Practice Prize was awarded to Dr. Kumar at the 2011-12 ISMS-MSI Practice Conference at the University of Maryland, Washington D.C. Campus held on December 9-10, 2011. See here for more information about the award:

This award was presented to Dr. Kumar and his colleagues (Vikram Bhaskaran - Georgia State University; Rohan Mirchandani - The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania; Milap Shah - Co-Founder & Director, HokeyPokey) and for their novel and innovative research approach to measure social media ROI and customer's word of mouth value. The method involved creating a unique metric, Customer Influence Effect (CIE) to measure net influence wielded by a user in a social network and predicting the user's ability to generate viral information spread. Following this, another metric - Customer Influence Value (CIV) - was created to link word of mouth to the actual sales generated. This method was implemented at HokeyPokey, a chain of ice-cream retailers with a strong local presence in western India. The research findings show that social media can be used to generate sales, increase ROI, induce positive word-of-mouth, and spread brand knowledge. ]]> http://www.drvkumar.com/posts/?id=10 Thu, 26 Jan 2012 12:25:22 GMT Dr. V. Kumar was awarded the Outstanding Author Contribution Award for 2011 from the Review of Marketing Research (RMR). This award is presented for his article titled, "Looking Through the Marketing Lens: My Journey So Far," published in the latest issue (Volume 8 - Special Issue) of the Series. This Special Issue focuses on Marketing Legends wherein, so far nine marketing scholars have been declared as "Legends". It should be noted that Dr. Kumar was recently declared as one of the "Legends in Marketing". This Issue contains articles by all the nine legends where they have summarized their experiences in research and academic life.

The Review of Marketing Research annual series provides current, state-of-the-art articles by the marketing field's leading researchers and academicians. This Series publishes longer chapters that are not only theoretically rigorous but also offer richer detail, including literature reviews, cutting-edge methodologies, empirical studies, emerging trends, international developments, guidelines for implementation, and suggestions for future theory development and testing. ]]> http://www.drvkumar.com/posts/?id=14 Fri, 23 Dec 2011 10:50:33 GMT Dr. Kumar has been selected as a winner of the 2012 Paul D. Converse Award in recognition of his achievements and contributions to the Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) body of work.

This award was established to honor those who have contributed significantly to the theory of marketing and toward the advancement of science in marketing. Eligibility criteria for this award include that the contributions will have to be at least five years old after it is generally available to marketing academics or students, by publication or otherwise. The five-year time frame allows for perspective and ensures that the award honors contributions that have stood the test of time. The conferring of this award on Dr. Kumar only indicates the significant contribution and impact he has in the field of marketing.

The Converse awards are bestowed over a weekend-long symposium, which includes presentations by the winners and a discussion of the winner's contribution to be led by a discussant of the winner's choice. The dates for the Eighteenth Paul D. Converse Symposium are April 26-29, 2012, at the College of Business at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. ]]> http://www.drvkumar.com/posts/?id=9 Wed, 7 Dec 2011 14:59:06 GMT Dr. Kumar was recently selected as a "Legend in Marketing", and his research work will be compiled and featured in the forthcoming "Legends in Marketing" Series, edited by Dr. Jagdish Sheth (Series Editor) and published by the Sage Publications. Other marketing scholars declared as Legends include Richard Bagozzi, Shelby Hunt, Philip Kotler, Naresh Malhotra, Kent Monroe, Jagdish Sheth, Yoram "Jerry" Wind, and Gerald Zaltman.

The objective of this series is to ensure that the marketing scholar's legacy is widely disseminated to the next generation of marketing researchers, and to preserve this body of knowledge as a legacy in the field of Marketing. The research work of the Legend will be organized into 6 - 10 volumes by topics and themes in the Legends Series. Each volume in this series will have a Volume Editor who will write an introductory article about the Legend and 3 - 4 commentaries on the Legends' work by three scholars in marketing. ]]> http://www.drvkumar.com/posts/?id=13 Fri, 8 Jan 2010 10:24:59 GMT Dr. V. Kumar was recently named as one of the finalist for the 2009-10 ISMS Practice Prize Award. Each year the INFORMS Society for Marketing Science holds a Practice Prize Competition which is awarded for an outstanding implementation of marketing science concepts and methods. The methodology used must be sound and appropriate to the problem and organization, and the work should have had significant, verifiable, and quantitative impact on the performance of the client firm.

Dr. Kumar was declared as a finalist for this award in recognition of the research study titled, "Uncovering Implicit Consumer Needs for Determining Explicit Product Positioning: Growing Prudential Annuities' Variable Annuity Sales" he undertook along with his colleague - Dr. Denish Shah, Georgia State University. The study involved the development and implementation of the "Emotion Quotient" (EQ) Tool for Prudential, in an effort to help solve their challenge of achieving meaningful product differentiation and to increase the sales of their variable annuities. The EQ Tool enabled Prudential to redefine its marketing and sales approach along a proactive (as opposed to responsive) market orientation paradigm. This implementation enabled Prudential to gain over $450 million lift in variable annuity sales and contributed to consumer welfare by promoting awareness of behavioral risk to investors who are within five years of their retirement. Read more about this study here. ]]> http://www.drvkumar.com/posts/?id=11 Wed, 2 Dec 2009 08:20:42 GMT Dr. V. Kumar was recently named as one of the finalist for the 2007 ISMS Practice Prize Award. Each year the INFORMS Society for Marketing Science holds a Practice Prize Competition which is awarded for an outstanding implementation of marketing science concepts and methods. The methodology used must be sound and appropriate to the problem and organization, and the work should have had significant, verifiable, and quantitative impact on the performance of the client firm.

Dr. Kumar was declared as a finalist for this award in recognition of the research study titled, "Marketing-Mix Recommendation to Maximize value Growth at P&G Asia-Pacific" along with his colleagues - Jia Fan, University of Connecticut; Rohit Gulati and P. Venkat, P&G Asia Pacific. This study measured the price and distribution elasticities for all of P&G's detergent products for a South Asian market by building a random coefficient model with system of equations. A sales volume and value simulator were developed based on the model results. By using this simulator, P&G increased their prices to the optimal price level and reallocated their marketing resources to the SKUs with the highest potential to increase the sales volume. As a result, P&G gained over 39 million dollars in value growth over a one year period due to the implementation of the recommendations from our modeling approach. Read more about this study here. ]]> http://www.drvkumar.com/posts/?id=8 Sat, 1 Dec 2007 08:23:36 GMT Dr. V. Kumar was recently named as one of the finalist for the 2006 ISMS Practice Prize Award. Each year the INFORMS Society for Marketing Science holds a Practice Prize Competition which is awarded for an outstanding implementation of marketing science concepts and methods. The methodology used must be sound and appropriate to the problem and organization, and the work should have had significant, verifiable, and quantitative impact on the performance of the client firm.

Dr. Kumar was declared as a finalist for this award in recognition of the research study titled, "The Power of CLV: Managing Customer Lifetime Value at IBM" along with his colleagues - Rajkumar Venkatesan, University of Virginia; Tim Bohling and Denise Beckmann, IBM Corporation. This study described a carefully planned and implemented program within IBM to optimize the number of times the organization contacts its customers, incorporating innovations with respect to alignment with corporate objectives, forecasting cost to serve, imputing unobserved contribution margins, and allowing for inter-dependence of purchase incidence and quantity. As a result, IBM gained over 20 million dollars in value growth over a one year period due to the implementation of the recommendations from the modeling approach suggested here. Read more about this study here. ]]> http://www.drvkumar.com/posts/?id=12 Sat, 2 Dec 2006 08:00:00 GMT