PUBLICATIONS

The Past, Present, and Future of Marketing Strategy

Sibel Sozuer,  Gregory S. Carpenter, Praveen K. Kopalle, Leigh M. McAlister and Donald R. Lehmann 

Marketing Letters, 2020. [Paper]

This article provides a high-level overview of marketing strategy research and offers a number of suggestions of areas ripe for future research. We discuss the most fundamental concepts that continue to drive current marketing strategy research and examine how these concepts have shaped marketing strategy and the role of the marketing function. In addition, we highlight the developments in marketing accountability, marketing’s influence within the firm, and alternatives to a market-driven approach in generating sustainable competitive advantage. Finally, we identify directions for future research in the light of recent developments, availability of new data, and emerging issues.

WORKING PAPERS

A Recipe for Creative Recipes: An Ingredient Embedding Approach 

Sibel Sozuer, Oded Netzer and Kriste Krstovski (Job Market Paper) [Paper]

• Shankar-Spiegel Dissertation Proposal Award, Marketing EDGE, 2020
• ISMS Early Stage Research Grant, INFORMS Society for Marketing Science, 2020

An idea can be described as a collection of existing concepts or words. What makes an idea original or creative is how these concepts or words are combined in the context in which they appear. In a similar manner, a food recipe may be perceived as novel or conventional and evaluated based on the combination of ingredients in the recipe and how they fit together. In this research, we build on representation learning research, specifically word embeddings, to evaluate and generate novel food recipes. Embeddings allow us to model the complex interactions between the ingredients in the recipe and build measures of fit between any ingredient in the recipe and the context in which it appears. Using a large-scale online recipe dataset with over 57K recipes, we investigate how the fit between the ingredients relates to people’s attitudes towards recipes in terms of popularity (trial), favorability (ratings), and perceived creativity. Counter to previous research on creativity, which primarily suggests that creativity is associated with positive outcomes, we find that recipes with unique ingredients have lower trial, but a higher favorability given trial. We also find that high fit among ingredients promotes both trial and evaluation. We validate our results using an online panel experiment. We then develop a generative recipe tool that suggests recipe improvements by adding, removing, or substituting ingredients (http://recipecreativity.com/).

The Newsvendor Problem with Multiple Inputs Under a Carbon Emission Constraint

Sibel Sozuer, Ulku Gurler and Emre Berk

In this research, we study the impact of carbon emission regulations on production as well as firm and customer welfare in a newsvendor setting. We extend the classical newsvendor setting to consider the multi- input production decision of a manufacturer that produces a single product by transforming multiple substitutable inputs via alternative production functions under carbon emission regulations. These regulations are incorporated into our study through a penalty function that models taxation, strict carbon caps or cap-and-trade settings. The optimal production policy involves the optimal choice of the input mix and the production quantity that maximize the expected profit of the manufacturer. We also complement our theoretical findings with a real-life agricultural production example. We find that distinct attributes of the inputs and the optimal choice of their mixture to produce a unit quantity become particularly important when emission constraints are imposed by exogenous bodies. We find that the manufacturer copes with carbon emission regulations by switching to low emitting inputs without significant reductions in service levels up to a certain level of target emission reduction. For more ambitious target carbon emission restrictions, manufacturer decreases the service level to reduce carbon emissions even further, which surprisingly may lead to an increase in unit carbon footprint per output.

RESEARCH IN PROGRESS

Embedding-based Diet Specific Food Recommendation, with Oded Netzer and J. Jeffrey Inman

Asymmetries in Cultural Diffusion, with Olivier Toubia