Mentor Areas
Barbara is an internationally recognized scholar on variety seeking, brand loyalty, retail assortment issues and patient decision-making whose research provides marketing managers with a better understanding of the consumer choice process. Her research interests include consumer choice, variety seeking, product assortments, brand management, retailing, brand loyalty, customization, decisions under uncertainty/ambiguity, customer relationship management, medical and financial services, and price promotions.
Description:
I am interested in how consumers make decisions in several settings; projects include: how FOMO influences behavior and reactions to brand strategies, patient decision-making; and how design factors can influence shopping in-store and on the mobile phone.
Current project: Building on the Kahn “retail success matrix,” the purpose of this research is to discover what retailers are doing and thinking in terms of producing valuable customer experiences. The focus will be strategic: what are the priorities, what are the tradeoffs, and how are they balancing short-term and long-term objectives? What are their learnings? From a measurement perspective, what are the key KPIs? How are they using customer experience to reduce customer acquisition and retention costs, build lifetime value, increase loyalty and satisfaction, and upsell and cross-sell? What are customer experiences that have already been discarded? How is technology being used to advance customer experience? What insights are we gleaning to identify the enablers of superior competitive advantage, e.g., what are the customer experiences generating sustainable superior leadership solutions? Is the priority to reduce friction or to enhance opportunities? What do these priorities depend on?
Preferred Qualifications
Sophomores through seniors only. For this project, marketing research skills are useful. Understanding psychology and consumer behavior theories would also be helpful.
Responsibilities include: literature review, collecting and analyzing data; helping conduct experiments; running field studies
Details:
Preferred Student Year
Second-Year, Junior, Senior
Academic Term
Fall, Spring
I prefer to have students start during the above term(s).Volunteer
No
Yes indicates that faculty are open to volunteers.Paid
No
Yes indicates that faculty are open to paying students they engage in their research, regardless of their work-study eligibility.Work Study
Yes
Yes indicates that faculty are open to hiring work-study-eligible students.