Senior lecturer Renée Richardson Gosline speaks with Boston Globe reporter Maddie Khaw about new marketing strategies and how they are being used to promote the latest water bottle trends. “If you can get the right influencer to talk about your stuff, you’ve got more targeted communications,” says Gosline. “What people buy has started to replace a sense of social connection and identity that is missing for many people.”
Writing for Sports Business Journal, Sloan Lecturer Shira Springer explores how the success of the “Barbie” movie could be applied to women's sports. “The ultimate goals for competitions that feature female athletes: Build a fandom and a movement capable of organic growth, convert casual fans into avid fans, attract the previously indifferent and uninterested,” writes Springer. “‘Barbie”’ did that. Moviegoers didn’t simply watch the movie; many joined in the fun, the new fandom and the new movement.”
Prof. Catherine Elizabeth Tucker speaks with BBC host Ed Butler about her research on effective online advertising. “It turns out that all too often it is not working as well as we were led to believe,” says Tucker.
Forbes contributor Patrick Rishe spotlights the 2022 MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, which addressed equity analytics, the Rooney rule, sports marketing in the metaverse, and the future of AI in sports. “Advancements in technology and tracking granular layers of fan behavior at (and away from) sports venues are giving brands deeper insights on connecting a particular partnership with real consumer purchase intentions,” writes Rishe.
Forbes reporter Abdo Riani spotlights an MIT and Northwestern study that uncovered why startup founders should be more cautious when listening to customer feedback. In a “study of six years’ worth of transactional data of 130 thousand customers in large retail chains…[researchers] made an interesting discovery – about 25% of customers consistently buy products that end up failing within 3 years,” writes Riani.
Lisa Spear of Newsweek reports that MIT researchers have found marketing algorithms do not show STEM job ads to women because reaching them through advertising is more expensive. “This means that fewer women are seeing the advertising for science related jobs, even though it’s illegal to target jobs to one gender,” explains Spear.
A study by Prof. Catherine Tucker finds that marketing algorithms prevent many women from seeing STEM career ads, reports Dina Fine Maron for Scientific American. Tucker explains that the, “economics driving the phenomenon are global—female eyeballs are more expensive and a cost-minimizing algorithm will choose not to show ads to them.”
TVision, a startup founded by Yan Liu SM ’15, uses cameras and deep learning to “detect how closely people are paying attention to the shows they’re watching,” writes Jordan Graham of The Boston Herald. The company, “founded while Liu was in the middle of completing his MBA at MIT, has raised close to $10 million in investor funding,” Graham reports.
Joe Coughlin, director of the AgeLab, has a new book called The Longevity Economy, which examines how companies can better serve older consumers, writes Robert Powell for USA Today. “A new generation of older adults is beginning to demand far more out of later life than ever before: not just passive consumerism, but the active pursuit of meaning,” says Coughlin.
Joseph Coughlin, director of the AgeLab, writes for Forbes that older female consumers are powerful, yet products geared toward them are poorly marketed. “The insights that occur to this particular consumer group are powerful enough to raze major companies to the ground — and raise new ones out of the rubble,” writes Coughlin.
An MIT study finds that online and in-store goods are sold at the same price 70 percent of the time, reports Meghan Woolhouse of The Boston Globe. Prof. Alberto Cavallo believes online and in store prices are typically the same because shoppers would likely react badly “to price differences for the same goods from the same retailer.”
A study co-authored by Prof. Karen Zheng examines how fear that items will go out of stock can motivate shoppers to pay full price, increasing stores’ profits, reports CNBC reporter Susie Poppick. “It turns out people tend to believe certain products will be sold faster or sooner than they actually are,” explains Zheng.
Wall Street Journal reporter Brenda Cronin writes that MIT researchers have identified a group of consumers that routinely buy products that fail. “You’ve got to think about who’s buying” the product, explains Prof. Duncan Simester. “If it’s these harbingers buying them….and if they keep buying them…then you’ve got a problem.”
CNBC’s John Schoen writes that MIT researchers have identified a group of consumers that repeatedly buy unpopular products. "You might have thought this was a category-specific effect — someone who buys the wrong makeup," explains Prof. Catherine Tucker. "But the strongest effects were going across category.”
MIT researchers have found that certain consumers are more prone to buying products that end up failing, reports Peter Coy for Bloomberg Business. “It's not just that certain people try out new products that turn out to be unsuccessful,” writes Coy. “It's that they keep going back for more of them.”