The Kilts Center for Marketing invites you to attend a Marketing Faculty Feature event with Professor Oleg Urminsky. Professor Urminsky will present his talk titled, "No Substitute for the Real Thing: Why Scientific Experimentation is Essential for Marketing Decisions" where he will provide examples that illustrate the importance of proper experimentation and how it can positively or negatively impact real-world business decisions.

NOTE: Please select one ticket type when registering (either in-person or livestream). A recording of the livestream will be sent to all registrants after the event.

Full Event Description

Experimental methods and A/B testing are the gold standard for data-driven decision-making, with companies such as Google, Amazon and Facebook leading the way. Adoption has been slow in many areas of marketing, with decision makers instead relying on expert judgment or survey-based research for crucial decisions. I'll talk about recent examples that illustrate the importance of properly conducted experiments and I'll present new research that tests how accurately academic theory, expert judgment and consumer survey data each predict whether novel fundraising tactics will improve or harm actual outcomes.

Speaker Bio

Oleg Urminsky studies consumer and managerial decision making and its implications for marketing management. He is particularly interested in goals and motivations, intertemporal decision making, consumer beliefs and inference, statistical reasoning and customer relationship management (e.g., reward/loyalty programs and incentive systems). He teaches experimental research methods for MBA students.

Urminsky's research has been published in the Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, Journal of Marketing Research, and Psychological Science as well as other journals. His paper, "The Goal-Gradient Hypothesis Resurrected: Purchase Acceleration, Illusionary Goal Progress, and Customer Retention" was a finalist for the 2007 Paul Green award and 2011 O'Dell award. His recent research investigates the role that a belief in a stable self-identity (e.g. 'connectedness' to the future self) plays in making farsighted choices, how optimism and pessimism affect preferences for change, how suggested default amounts affect donation behavior and how ending an incentive affects people’s motivation.

Urminsky's past experience includes serving as a research director and corporate vice president at Young & Rubicam Advertising, where he worked on the largest worldwide study of brands, the Brand Asset Valuator, investigating the links between consumer perceptions and subsequent financial performance. Urminsky had previously worked in political polling and custom marketing research.

Urminsky earned a bachelor's degree in analytic philosophy and mathematics from Princeton University, holds a master's degree in statistics from the Stern School of Business and earned his PhD in applied statistics and psychological measurement from Columbia University.

Marketing Faculty Feature: Oleg Urminsky on Why Scientific Experimentation is Essential for Marketing Decisions