Marketing & sales

Consumers’ growing appetite for streaming content is changing the way studios produce and market feature films. But could they better reach audiences through analysis of tastes, personalities and lifestyles? Professor Anthony Palomba finds there’s more data out there for studios to capture and better understand movie platform or genre consumption

Darden Professor Anthony Palomba is an expert in media management, an interdisciplinary academic discipline that examines how audiences consume media and entertainment products and services, as well as how entertainment companies compete amid shifting consumer preferences. He recently answered five questions on the rapidly shifting media landscape.

Professor Whitler looks at Western executives of multinational brands who use traditional media and ad strategies, based on marketing theories and practices created largely in the West. This often leads to marketing campaigns that require months of planning, consulting with ad agencies, content creation and carefully allocating money.

What is the word-of-machine effect? Professor Luca Cian writes for Harvard Business Review (TAG) on his recent research highlighting when people prefer AI recommendations over human ones.

A feeling so common it has an acronym: fear of missing out. But what happens when activities are unavailable due to the coronavirus? Lalin Anik, an expert on consumer behavior and social connections, discusses FOMO in the pandemic: how it’s changed shape, the effect on mental health, and how we may balance it with risk aversion as states open up.

How Jeep and Bill Murray responded to a pandemic: a popular Super Bowl commercial for an SUV reincarnated as a message encouraging consumers to stay home and off the road. Here are an expert marketer’s observations of how brands shifted when faced with an integral shift in the way the world did business and people lived their lives.

University of Virginia Darden School of Business Professor Lalin Anik joins the Batten Institute’s Sean Carr to explore the evolution of consumer behavior in response to COVID-19, how brands are reacting, and what the future may hold as people look to them for trust and meaning amidst the uncertainty.

Peloton disrupted the home fitness space, bringing a boutique exercise experience to users’ homes and reaching a value of $4 billion by spring 2019. It was a complex business model of factors ranging from interactive technology to star power to retail success to connection to a firmly connected social media community.

People are romantically drawn to warm, kind people who treat others well. But when it comes to how a partner treats us, we really want special treatment. Both desires stand to reason, but are they equally important? (Hint: They’re not.) What are we willing to sacrifice to get what we want from a partnership?

Professor Kimberly Whitler shares five characteristics that better ads tend to have in common.