The Wharton School is the business school of the University of Pennsylvania, a private Ivy League research university in Philadelphia. Established in 1881 through a donation from Joseph Wharton, a co-founder of Bethlehem Steel, the Wharton School is the world's oldest collegiate business school, and one of six Ivy League Business Schools. The Wharton School is the business school which has produced the highest number of billionaires in the US.
Viral marketing is a business strategy that uses existing social networks to promote a product mainly on various social media platforms. Its name refers to how consumers spread information about a product with other people, much in the same way that a virus spreads from one person to another. It can be delivered by word of mouth, or enhanced by the network effects of the Internet and mobile networks.
Influencer marketing is a form of social media marketing involving endorsements and product placement from influencers, people and organizations who have a purported expert level of knowledge or social influence in their field. Influencers are someone with the power to affect the buying habits or quantifiable actions of others by uploading some form of original—often sponsored—content to social media platforms like Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat, TikTok or other online channels. Influencer marketing is when a brand enrolls influencers who have an established credibility and audience on social media platforms to discuss or mention the brand in a social media post. Influencer content may be framed as testimonial advertising, according to the Federal Trade Commission in the United States. The FTC started enforcing this on a large scale in 2016, sending letters to several companies and influencers who had failed to disclosed sponsored content. Many Instagram influencers started using #ad in response and feared that this would affect their income. However, fans increased their engagement after disclosure, being happy that they were landing such deals. This success led to some creators creating their own product lines in 2017. Some influencers fake sponsored content to grain credibility and promote themselves. Backlash to sponsored content became more prominent in mid-2018, leading to many influencers to focus instead on authenticity.
A seeding trial or marketing trial is a form of marketing, conducted in the name of research, designed to target product sampling towards selected consumers. In the marketing research field, seeding is the process of allocating marketing to specific customers, or groups of customers, in order to stimulate the internal dynamics of the market, and enhance the diffusion process. In medicine, seeding trials are clinical trials or research studies in which the primary objective is to introduce the concept of a particular medical intervention—such as a pharmaceutical drug or medical device—to physicians, rather than to test a scientific hypothesis.
Marketing buzz or simply buzz—a term used in viral marketing—is the interaction of consumers and users with a product or service which amplifies or alters the original marketing message. This emotion, energy, excitement, or anticipation about a product or service can be positive or negative. Buzz can be generated by intentional marketing activities by the brand owner or it can be the result of an independent event that enters public awareness through social or traditional media such as newspapers. Marketing buzz originally referred to oral communication but in the age of Web 2.0, social media such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube are now the dominant communication channels for marketing buzz.
Social media marketing is the use of social media platforms and websites to promote a product or service. Although the terms e-marketing and digital marketing are still dominant in academia, social media marketing is becoming more popular for both practitioners and researchers.
Itamar Simonson is a professor of marketing, holding the Sebastian S. Kresge Chair of Marketing in the Graduate School of Business, Stanford University. He is known for his work on the factors that determine the choices that buyers make. His academic career started at the University of California at Berkeley, where he taught for six years, before he moved to Stanford. Many of his former PhD students hold senior positions at some of the best universities in the world.
Word-of-mouth marketing is the communication between consumers about a product, service, or company in which the sources are considered independent of direct commercial influence that has been actively influenced or encouraged as a marketing effort. While it is difficult to truly control word of mouth communication, there are three generic avenues to 'manage' word of mouth communication for the purpose of word-of-mouth marketing, including:
Anindya Ghose is an Indian-born American academic, and the Heinz Riehl Chair Professor of Business at New York University's Stern School of Business and the director of the Masters of Business Analytics & AI program at NYU Stern. He is the author of TAP: Unlocking The Mobile Economy which is a double winner in the 2018 Axiom Business Book Awards and has been translated into five languages. He is a Leonard Stern Faculty Scholar with an MBA scholarship named after him. He has been a visiting professor at the Wharton School of Business. In 2014 he was named by the blog Poets and Quants as one of the "Top 40 Professors Under 40 Worldwide" and by Analytics Week as one of the "Top 200 Thought Leaders in Big Data and Business Analytics". In 2017 he was recognized by Thinkers50 as one of the Top 30 Management Thinkers globally most likely to shape the future of how organizations are managed and led in the next generation. Thinkers50 also bestowed the Distinguished Achievement Award Nomination for 'Digital Thinking' in 2017. In 2019, he was recognized by Web of Science citation Index in the top 1% of researchers selected for their significant influence in their fields over a 10-year period (2008-2018). He is a recipient of the prestigious INFORMS ISS Distinguished Fellow Award, given to recognize individuals who (i) have made outstanding intellectual contributions to the discipline with publications that have made a significant impact on theory, research, and practice and (ii) intellectual stewardship of the field as reflected in the mentoring of doctoral students and young researchers. His rise from assistant to full professor in 8.5 years at NYU Stern is widely regarded as one of the fastest in the history of the entire Information Systems, operations and Marketing academic disciplines in business schools globally.
Aradhna Krishna is an Indian-American academic focused on marketing. Harvard Business Review recently acknowledged her as "the foremost expert in the field" of sensory marketing. She is the Dwight F. Benton Professor of Marketing at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan. She was awarded as a fellow of the Society for Consumer Psychology, the organization's highest honor, in recognition of her contributions to consumer psychology.
Geeta Menon is the Abraham Krasnoff Professor of Global Business at New York University Stern School of Business, and is the current chair of the Marketing Department. Most recently, she was the 11th Dean of the NYU Stern Undergraduate College (2011-2019). She has been a member of NYU Stern's Marketing Faculty since 1990, where she also previously served a term as department chair (2004-2008). In January 2015, The Economic Times, India's leading business publication, listed Menon as one of 20 "most influential" global Indian women.
Amitava Chattopadhyay is the GlaxoSmithKline Chaired Professor in Corporate Innovation — Professor of Marketing at INSEAD, Fellow of the Institute on Asian Consumer Insights, and Senior Fellow at the Ernst & Young Institute for Emerging Market Studies.
John O'Shaughnessy was a British academic and business writer.
Viral phenomena or viral sensations are objects or patterns that are able to replicate themselves or convert other objects into copies of themselves when these objects are exposed to them. Analogous to the way in which viruses propagate, the term viral pertains to a video, image, or written content spreading to numerous online users within a short time period. This concept has become a common way to describe how thoughts, information, and trends move into and through a human population.
A consumer-brand relationship, also known as a brand relationship, is the relationship that consumers think, feel, and have with a product or company brand. For more than half a century, scholarship has been generated to help managers and stakeholders understand how to drive favorable brand attitudes, brand loyalty, repeat purchases, customer lifetime value, customer advocacy, and communities of like-minded individuals organized around brands. Research has progressed with inspiration from attitude theory and, later, socio-cultural theories, but a perspective introduced in the early 1990s offered new opportunities and insights. The new paradigm focused on the relationships that formed between brands and consumers: an idea that had gained traction in business-to-business marketing scholarship where physical relationships formed between buyers and sellers.
Eric J. Johnson is a professor of marketing at Columbia University where he is the inaugural holder of the Norman Eig Chair of Business. He is the co-director for the Center for Decision Sciences.
Joannes Evangelista Benedictus Maria "Jan-Benedict" Steenkamp is a marketing professor and author. He is the Knox Massey Distinguished Professor of Marketing at Kenan-Flagler Business School, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is also the co-founder and executive director of AiMark, a global center studying key marketing strategy issues. Steenkamp is the author of Time to Lead, Retail Disruptors, Global Brand Strategy, Brand Breakout and Private Label Strategy. He is one of the most cited scholars in business and marketing.
Paul Edgar Green was an American marketing professor and statistician. He was S.S. Kresge Professor of Marketing, and later Professor Emeritus at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania.
Cassie Mogilner Holmes is a professor of marketing and behavioral decision making at UCLA Anderson School of Management and author of Happier Hour. She is best known for her research on time and happiness..
Katherine L. Milkman is an American economist who is the James G. Dinan endowed Professor at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. She was previously the President of the Society for Judgment and Decision Making.
