MEDIA RELEASE
4 December 2007
Insight into supermarket specials garners top international award
Research by a University of Waikato Management School academic on the impact of sales promotions on brand switching has
won an international award for the most influential article appearing in the highly prestigious Journal of Marketing
Research.
The 2008 O’Dell Award is given to the authors of the article judged to have made the most significant long-run
contribution to marketing in the past five years. The O’Dell plaque is awarded by the American Marketing Association and
is one of the most esteemed scientific marketing awards in the world.
Prof Harald van Heerde of Waikato Management School is lead author of the paper, "Is 75% of the Sales Promotion Bump Due
to Brand Switching? No, Only 33% Is", which examines to what extent supermarket specials ‘steal’ sales from competing
brands.
Prof van Heerde says the research, co-authored with Prof Sachin Gupta of Cornell University, and Prof Dick R. Wittink of
Yale University, has fundamentally changed the way marketers view sales promotions. “Our research shows that only
one-third of the sales generated by promotions steal sales from other products, so this particular marketing tool is not
as harmful for competing products as previous research had assumed for decades.”
Earlier this year the paper was named by the INFORMS Society for Marketing Science as one of the 20 most influential
marketing articles worldwide in the past 25 years.
ENDS