Marketing Ph.D. Students Excel as Isenberg Scholars
October 5, 2009
Jason Gabisch, Ereni Markos and Lauren Labrecque are Ph.D. candidates in marketing. Over the past three years, all three have received Isenberg Scholar Awards. Created by Eugene Isenberg '50 fourteen years ago, the awards offer financial assistance each year to UMass Amherst graduate students who integrate business, science, and technology into their studies and research. By and large, the awards have gone to students in the sciences, engineering, and business--the latter mostly to scholars who focus on entrepreneurship or operations and technology management. Why, then, the recent spate of students in marketing?
Peering through the Consumer Lens. "For us, the answer is self-evident," observes 2007 Isenberg Scholar Lauren Labrecque. "As marketing students, we bring a consumer perspective to product and technology development. We are interested in how advanced or efficient a technology or new product might be; but we're also passionately interested in the total consumer experience with the product." Why, asks Labrecque, did consumers find early versions of Microsoft's Vista operating system so unfriendly? Why did Apple take two years to resolve problems with its iPhone's cut-and-paste application? It's because the business cultures that spawned both products focused more on technology than on consumers, emphasizes Labrecque, whose dissertation is exploring the influence of color in marketing and product branding. (Labrecque, Gabisch, and Markos' dissertations are all chaired by marketing professor George Milne.)
"Determining what consumers want can be challenging," observes 2008 award recipient Jason Gabisch. "That often involves product trials and customization of the product itself." The process may call for far greater interaction with consumers than creators of new product technologies had bargained for, he notes. "As marketers, we see the process both through consumer- and market-based lenses," emphasizes Gabisch, whose research is exploring how virtual product trials for consumers influence their purchasing decisions in the real world. Bringing a new product to market though is itself daunting, he continues. As an MBA student at the University of New Hampshire, Gabisch worked with an environmental engineering professor to bring carbon sequestration technology to the marketplace. "Both of us gained a greater appreciation for the difficulty of that process, which involved capitalization, patents, networking, and, of course, marketing," he remarks.
Current Isenberg awardee Ereni Markos joined the Isenberg School's Ph.D. program with an understanding of the not uncommon "disconnect" between technologists and consumers. "As a media planner in Boston, I decided how to best reach target audiences by placing ads in various media outlets," she recalls. "I remember helping one high-profile technology client define its target market. When the client came to us, it hadn't figured out what that market was."
Exploring Privacy Concerns. "Technologists, incidentally, can be as vulnerable as the rest of us when it comes to their own online privacy," Markos adds. For her dissertation, Markos is exploring consumers' perceptions of what constitutes sensitive personal online information. She is measuring the likelihood that consumers will cross that line through blogging, social networking, ecommerce, and other activities. "The real damage to privacy comes when data miners aggregate information about an individual from unrelated sites. "It can add up to a revealing personal portrait and an invasion of privacy," she observes. "Most of us have no clue when they are the targets. It's a growing concern for public policy and a risk to us all-technorati included."
