Thomas J. Steenburgh
There are 12 articles for this faculty member.
Getting the Marketing Mix Right
| Published: | October 20, 2011 |
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| Feature: | Research & Ideas |
| Forum: | open for comment; 2 Comments posted |
Marketers have a wide array of selling tools at their disposal, but lack an effective method for predicting their success. Associate Professor Thomas J. Steenburgh and collaborators offer a new model for guiding their marketing investments.
Perfecting the Project Pitch
| Published: | August 11, 2011 |
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| Feature: | Lessons from the Classroom |
| Forum: | open for comment; 8 Comments posted |
Entrepreneurs may be great innovators, but not necessarily great presenters. Associate Professor Thomas Steenburgh teaches them the fine art of product pitching.
Sharpening Your Skills: Motivation
| Published: | June 22, 2011 |
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| Feature: | Sharpening Your Skills |
Can employers motivate employees to work more creatively, ethically, or productively? Or does that power reside solely within the individual? Recent research at Harvard Business School suggests workers can be motivated by their environment.
Published in 2010
Do Bonuses Enhance Sales Productivity? A Dynamic Structural Analysis of Bonus-Based Compensation Plans
| Authors: | Doug J. Chung, Thomas Steenburgh, and K. Sudhir |
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| Published: | November 19, 2010 |
| Paper Release Date: | October 2010 |
| Feature: | Working Papers |
Companies generally pay their sales staff with some combination of salary, commissions, and bonuses for meeting quotas-with sales force costs averaging about 10 percent of sales revenue in the United States. This paper aims to gain insight into the most effective way to design a compensation plan, concentrating on whether bonuses boost sales productivity and whether they should be awarded quarterly or annually. Research, focusing on the sales force of a large office supply company, was conducted by Harvard Business School professor Thomas Steenburgh and Doug J. Chung and K. Sudhir of the Yale School of Management.
HBS Introduces Marketing Analysis Tools for Managers
| Q&A with: | Thomas J. Steenburgh |
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| Published: | August 16, 2010 |
| Feature: | Lessons from the Classroom |
The tools can help managers inform decisions on market analysis, breakeven analysis, customer lifetime value, profit and pricing, and analyzing the competitive environment. Interview with Tom Steenburgh.
Published in 2009
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, revised December 2009 |
| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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.
