Marketing Department Is Driving Force behind National Conference and Seminar

Three Isenberg marketing professors--Easwar Iyer, George Milne, and Elizabeth Miller--excelled as co-chairs of the American Marketing Association's annual Marketing and Public Policy Conference in Boston on June 5-7.  The Conference, at the Omni Parker House, attracted over 200 participants, including attendees from academe, industry, and the policy world. An associated doctoral seminar on June 2-5 at Isenberg drew 43 participants, including eight nationally prominent faculty members and 35 doctoral candidates. (The photo above depicts doctoral seminar participants with Miller, Iyer, and Milne in the second row.)

The main conference in Boston featured cutting-edge research that tackled smoking behavior, nutritional issues, racial profiling of consumers, advertising to children and other vulnerable consumers, environmental and sustainability issues, privacy, financial decision making, and many other topics. An opening panel assessed the performance and prospects for the Federal Trade Commission, now one hundred years old. In all, the conference showcased 32 topical sessions and over 100 papers.

Among the Isenberg participants, Professor Milne was a panelist in a session that explored changing practices of information gathering and deployment at traditional companies in light of increasing digitization, notably Big Data. PhD candidate Yana Andonova gave a paper, co-authored with Isenberg professors Miller and Kathleen Debevec that examined the placement of nutritional information on the front of food packages.

Doctoral Seminar at Isenberg

"The associated doctoral seminar at Isenberg was a tremendous opportunity for PhD students to learn from nationally prominent professors and from each other," emphasizes Iyer. "We built lots of opportunities into the seminar for student networking with one another and with faculty, including the editor from our discipline's leading journal for policy research," adds Miller.  The 35 students (six of them from Isenberg) heard prominent faculty discuss their own policy research and research methods.  In small panels designed as mentoring sessions, the students received valuable advice on research funding, publishing, conducting cross-disciplinary research, and other topics.

They also gathered in small groups--faculty included--with each student presenting a research idea subject to feedback from the participants. And in three workshops, each devoted to a separate research area-poverty, sustainability, and healthcare/nutrition-they identified and brainstormed solutions to gaps in knowledge and barriers in research.

"The seminar was also a showcase for us to share our doctoral students with the world," remarks Milne, who is director of Isenberg's PhD program. Many Isenberg doctoral students in marketing, he notes,  have gravitated toward policy issues. That's because policy studies are an "evolving strength" in the department. 

The three Isenberg co-chairs are themselves accomplished researchers in the marketing/public policy domain. Milne has focused on internet privacy, which he quips may become marketing's 5th "p."  Miller studies ways to promote healthier medical and nutritional decisions by consumers.  Iyer has made contributions in environmental marketing and socially responsible investing. And the department's chair, Bruce Weinberg, has championed their research and the AMA conference. For Milne, the bottom line is straightforward: "Using marketing research and business itself to improve our world is deeply satisfying, both intellectually and emotionally."