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Marketing Science Institute

Founded in 1961, the Marketing Science Institute (MSI) is a corporate-membership-based organization dedicated to bridging the gap between marketing theory and business practice. Leading researchers from universities worldwide participate in MSI research programs.

As a nonprofit institution, MSI financially supports academic research for the development—and practical translation—of marketing knowledge on topics of importance to business performance. Issues of key importance are identified by the Board of Trustees, which represents MSI corporations and the academic community. MSI supports studies by academics on these issues and disseminates the results through conferences and workshops, as well as through its publications series.

Record of MSI output approaches a thousand working papers and books, many of which have garnered the marketing field’s most prestigious awards. MSI co-sponsors academic conferences around the world. In addition, in the past 10 years, it has sponsored 60+ practitioner conferences in the U.S., as well as conferences in 13 countries.

MSI headquarters are located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The primary governing body of MSI is the Board of Trustees. MSI Executive Directors oversee the quality and content of MSI-sponsored research.

History

In 1961, Scott Paper Company President Thomas B. McCabe founded the “Institute for Science in Marketing” with input from leading thinkers John Howard, Albert Wesley Frey, and Wroe Alderson. Twenty-nine companies responded to his membership appeal, establishing MSI as a nonprofit organization that would “contribute to the emergence of a definitive science of marketing” and “stimulate increased application of scientific techniques to the understand and solving or current marketing problems.” Offices were established in Philadelphia near the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, and Wendell Smith became its first president.

MSI's founding coincided with a period of booming growth in the U.S. marketing systems, fueled by pent-up demand from war-years restrictions on production of consumer goods, and an explosion in population growth. Key marketing concepts, such as the “4 Ps” (product, price, place, promotion) of marketing were introduced. Management science theory, methods, and tools were infused into marketing, and consumer behavior emerged as an area of study within marketing.

In its first decade, MSI supported the development of new tools for marketers, such as multidimensional scaling, stochastic modeling, causal modeling, and decision calculus marketing. It also provided the foundation for advances in new product development. In 1968, MSI moved to Cambridge and began a 15-year association with the Harvard Business School.

In the early 1970s, MSI launched and managed the Profit Impact of Marketing Strategy project which, in conjunction with General Electric, created and analyzed a cross-sectional database that described marketing strategies and profitability across hundreds of business units. The results, widely reported, demonstrated the value of a scientific approach to marketing.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, MSI assembled teams to shape policy at the Federal Trade Commission and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. MSI also played an important role in introducing qualitative consumer research methods, including the Consumer Behavior Odyssey, a summer-long road trip in 1986 that laid the foundation for the field of consumer ethnography.

By the 1980s, MSI research on services marketing reflected a growing awareness that consumer service businesses required a reappraisal of marketing approaches originally developed in the packaged goods context. In 1986, a consortium of MSI member companies contributed funding and data to support a stream of research that culminated in SERVQUAL,a scale for measuring customer perceptions of service quality that has been widely adopted by service businesses.

During this time, the role of marketing in strategic planning received increased attention. MSI research introduced key concepts such as market orientation and marketing capabilities.

The conceptualization and measurement of brand equity originated in MSI-sponsored research in the early 1990s. The impact of marketing activities on firm performance and shareholder value (termed marketing ROI, marketing accountability, and return on marketing investment) has been an area of sustained MSI research interest. Through the '90s and 2000s, product innovation has remained at or near the top of MSI research priorities; and research interest has broadened to address service innovation as well as innovation in business models and processes.

Current Research

In the past decade, web-based and mobile technologies have transformed marketing's role. Firms require new ways to leverage information about customer preferences and behavior (including from “addressable” social and mobile media) to enhance or supplant conventional strategic planning, market segmentation, and targeting approaches.

Current MSI research addresses marketing questions emerging in a culture informed by social media and user-generated content: How can marketing develop compelling value propositions that leverage new technologies? What is the role of traditional advertising vehicles (TV, print) in this new landscape? How should marketers manage brands in a transformed marketplace? What conceptual frameworks from other disciplines--behavioral economics, neuroscience, anthropology, network analysis, psychology, history--enhance traditional methods of understanding consumer behavior?

More broadly, the Marketing Science Institute seeks to provide marketers with relevant academic research that enables them to:

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Anticipate changing marketing conditions, be responsive to cusotmer needs, and compete by offering superior value Manage an expanded and complex marketing mix in an evolving landscape to deliver value to customers and capture value for shareholders

Executive Directors Council

Ruth N. Bolton, Marketing Science Institute

George S. Day, University of Pennsylvania

Rohit Deshpandé, Harvard Business School

John U. Farley, Dartmouth College

Stephen A. Greyser,Harvard Business School

Dominique Hanssens, UCLA

Donald R. Lehmann, Columbia University

Leigh McAlister, University of Texas at Austin

David B. Montgomery, Stanford University

David J. Reibstein, University of Pennsylvania

Richard Staelin, Duke University

Louis W. Stern, Northwestern University

Frederick E. Webster, Jr., Dartmouth College

Russell S. Winer, New York University

External links

• MSI website
• [MSI member companies]
• [MSI 50th Anniversary website]