Professor. V. Kumar has recently been 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.

For this year's award Professor V. Kumar's submission with Jia Fan (University of Connecticut), Rohit Gulati and P. Venkat (P&G) is titled, "Marketing-Mix Recommedation to Maximize value Growth at P&G Asia-Pacific". The winner of the Practice Prize Competition will be selected this October at Wharton School of Business (Philadelphia). This research paper measured the price and distribution elasticities for all their detergent products in one of the most populated countries in the world by building a random coefficient model with system of equations. A sales volume and value simulator are developed based on our model results. By using this simulator, P&G increases their prices to the optimal price level and reallocate their marketing resources to the SKU's 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.

In addition, Professor. V. Kumar was a finalist for the 2006 ISMS Practice Prize Competition with Rajkumar Venkatesan (Darden Business School), Tim Bohling (IBM), and Denise Beckman (IBM). Their submission was titled, "The Power of CLV at IBM ". This research paper described a carefully planned and implemented program within IBM to optimize the number of times the oraganization "touches" 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 our modeling approach.