Thomas J. Steenburgh
There are 7 articles for this faculty member.
Crafting Integrated Multichannel Retailing Strategies
| Authors: | Jie Zhang, Paul Farris, Tarun Kushwaha, John Irvin, Thomas J. Steenburgh, and Barton Weitz |
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| Published: | May 29, 2009 |
| Paper Release Date: | April 2009 |
| Feature: | Working Papers |
The past fifteen years has been a period of rapid growth in the practice of multichannel retailing, mirroring the rise of the Internet as a nearly ubiquitous tool that firms use to interact with customers. More than 80 percent of a broad cross-section of U.S. retailers now report that they sell merchandise through multiple channels. This practice seems to be on the cusp of a new era in which firms start demanding even more from their investments, with particular emphasis being given to financial performance in light of the current economic crisis. These circumstances present a great opportunity both to firms that are looking to gain a competitive advantage through multichannel retailing and to researchers who are interested in helping them make more informed decisions. This article provides a broad discussion of these issues, synthesizes current knowledge, and suggests directions for future research.
Published in 2008
Solving the Marketing Resources Allocation Puzzle
| Q&A with: | Sunil Gupta and Thomas J. Steenburgh |
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| Published: | July 21, 2008 |
| Feature: | Research & Ideas |
Television spots, word-of-mouth, viral ads. Marketing managers have more options at their disposal than ever before. But how to decide? Harvard Business School professors Sunil Gupta and Thomas Steenburgh offer a way for managers to conceptualize the most effective approach.
An Investigation of Earnings Management through Marketing Actions
| Authors: | Craig J. Chapman and Thomas J. Steenburgh |
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| Published: | March 13, 2008 |
| Paper Release Date: | February 2008 |
| Feature: | Working Papers |
Earnings management behavior may be divided into two categories: 1) the opportunistic exercise of accounting discretion; and 2) the opportunistic structuring of real transactions. This paper focuses on the latter by providing evidence that managers use retail-level marketing actions (price discounts, feature advertisements, and aisle displays) to influence the timing of consumers' purchases in relation to their firms' fiscal calendars and financial performance. The results will be of interest to practitioners negotiating with suppliers as well as those responsible for setting price and promotion strategy in response to competitor actions, and practitioners responsible for designing incentive-based compensation as well as regulators monitoring reporting of fiscal period-ending promotion.
Allocating Marketing Resources
| Authors: | Sunil Gupta and Thomas J. Steenburgh |
|---|---|
| Published: | March 12, 2008 |
| Paper Release Date: | February 2008 |
| Feature: | Working Papers |
Deciding how to allocate marketing resources is particularly difficult because decisions need to be made at many different levels—across countries, products, marketing mix elements, and different vehicles within elements of the mix (e.g., television versus the Internet for advertising). With the increasing availability of data and sophistication in methods, it is now possible to more judiciously allocate marketing resources. In this paper, HBS professors Gupta and Steenburgh discuss a two-stage process where a model of demand is estimated in stage-one and its estimates are used as inputs in an optimization model in stage-two. The researchers propose a matrix with three approaches for each of these two stages, and discuss the pros and cons of these methods. They highlight each method with applications and case studies to present rigorous yet practical approaches to making marketing resource allocation decisions.
Published in 2007
Adding Bricks to Clicks: The Effects of Store Openings on Sales through Direct Channels
| Authors: | Jill Avery, Mary Caravella, John Deighton and Thomas Steenburgh |
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| Published: | February 12, 2007 |
| Paper Release Date: | February 2007 |
| Feature: | Working Papers |
Consider a retailer who operates both brick-and-mortar stores and direct channels such as direct mail catalogs and an Internet Web site. What effect does the opening of a new retail store have on direct channel sales in the retail trading area surrounding the store? Does the existence of more opportunities for consumer contact with the brand increase the retailer's direct sales, or does intra-brand, inter-channel competition erode the retailer's direct sales? Does consumer response to the retailer's brand evolve over time, perhaps as consumers go through some process of trial-and-error learning about the relative merits of stores and direct channels, or is the impact of the new store relatively discrete? Does the answer depend on whether consumers in the retail trading area have had the opportunity for previous experience with the brand's stores? This research used a proprietary longitudinal dataset from a multichannel retailer to understand what happens and to probe the implications for channel management strategy.
Published in 2005
Measuring Consumer and Competitive Impact with Elasticity Decompositions
| Author: | Thomas J. Steenburgh |
|---|---|
| Published: | July 5, 2006 |
| Paper Release Date: | May 2005, revised February 2006 |
| Feature: | Working Papers |
Do marketing actions expand the market or steal business from rival firms? One research method suggests that all of the demand created by an incremental advertising investment would be generated by market expansion; another suggests that the same increase would be stolen from rival firms. Steenburgh explains why these seemingly contradictory results actually are complementary and provide a more comprehensive understanding of the investment's impact.
Published in 2004
The IPS Property
| Author: | Thomas J. Steenburgh |
|---|---|
| Published: | July 5, 2006 |
| Paper Release Date: | August 2004 |
| Feature: | Working Papers |
This paper is about discrete-choice and econometric models. The "invariant proportion of substitution," or IPS, property comes into play when, for example, a consumer faces a choice among three laptop computers with slightly different attributes. How will improvements to one laptop's attributes affect how the consumer chooses to substitute one alternative for another? Steenburgh looked at probabilities based on assumptions about consumers' utility-maximizing behavior.
