Leaving a lasting impression

For Shankar Ganesan, receiving notice of a faculty member’s research award is exciting but not unheard of. As he will tell you, the Marketing Department has been on a roll, having had an incredible run of winning some prestigious awards over the last several years. But this latest award notice was different. “I was in complete shock – it was a total surprise,” said Ganesan, the John Cardinal O'Hara, C.S.C. Chair of the Marketing Department at the University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business. The Marketing Science Institute (MSI) was writing to notify Ganesan that Timothy J. Gilbride, the late Steve and Anne Odland Associate Professor of Marketing, and his fellow co-authors’ paper, “Right Metric for the Right Decision: A Behavioral Model to Infer Metric Effectiveness in Managerial Marketing-Mix Decision-Making” had received a best paper award. Gilbride passed away in 2019 at the age of 52 after a long fight with cancer.

“I did not know that Tim's co-authors had completed the working paper and submitted it to the Marketing Science Institute,” said Ganesan. “The fact that his co-authors had included him is a testament to Tim's scholarship and the co-authors' respect for his contributions.” The working paper was one of two studies to receive the Robert D. Buzzell MSI Best Paper Award for 2021. Instituted in 1993, the best paper award honors the authors of MSI working papers with the most significant contribution to marketing practice and thought as well as serves as an example of research that MSI believes will provide lasting value to corporate marketing executives. “The MSI awards are among the most important awards in the marketing discipline. Often, the MSI award winners end up being highly-cited and impactful in the marketing discipline,” explained Ganesan. The awarded working paper aims to develop a framework for the use and effectiveness of individual metrics for different marketing-mix decisions (product, place, price and promotion). The study features co-authors Ofer Mintz from the University of Technology Sydney, Peter Lenk from the University of Michigan and Imran S. Currim from the University of California Irvine. Currim described Gilbride as “extraordinarily skilled at what he did,” while Mintz reminisced, "He'd come up with solutions and econometric ideas that always amazed me. I seriously had no idea how he came up with some of these solutions, and he is one of the few people who blew me away because of his skill set." The overall focus of Gilbride’s research was on the development of Bayesian statistical methods in order to assist researchers and managers to better understand consumer preferences and to make decisions under uncertainty. Over his tenure, Gilbride also received multiple awards and recognition for teaching undergraduate and graduate students, including the Rev. Edmund P. Joyce, C.S.C., Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, Outstanding Professor of the Year Award for the Traditional MBA Program and being named one of the top 50 undergraduate business professors by Poets&Quants. Gilbride was diagnosed in 2011, and continued his teaching and research throughout his battle with cancer. He remained positive throughout the difficulties and challenges of his disease and even wrote an article for Mendoza Business magazine in 2014 titled, “The Mathematics of Hope.” “After reading the [MSI] announcement, I had mixed emotions,” said Ganesan. “I was proud of Tim for what he had accomplished professionally. But what I miss most is his caring and empathetic demeanor, eclectic tastes and collegiality.”