Podcast
How I Wrote This
Supported by the Journal of Marketing Research
About the Podcast

“Publish or perish” is a maxim academics live by. But how does a paper become a publication? How does a rough idea become a draft? And how do researchers navigate the publication process, with all the bumps and bruises along the way?

In each episode of How I Wrote This, marketing professors Brett Gordon and Karen Winterich speak with the authors of an academic marketing paper to uncover the backstory behind the work, from the first insight to publication in the Journal of Marketing Research.

BG
Kellogg, Northwestern
KW
Smeal, Penn State
Meet the hosts arrow_forward

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Latest episode
The No Hunger Games with Sylvia Hristakeva, Jura Liaukonyte & Leo Feler
Ep 27Mar 202658 min

GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic are disrupting the grocery aisle. This study linked GLP-1 usage surveys to 150,000 households’ purchase data and found grocery spending drops about 5% within six months.

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psychology
AI, Authorship, and the Editorial Process
Ep 26Feb 202645 min

Rebecca Hamilton, Kapil Tuli, and Raghu Iyengar join the hosts for a special episode on responsible AI use in research and in the JMR submission process.

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Persevering from the “Idea Nugget” to Publication with Yuechen Wu, Jared Watson & Ali Faraji-Rad
Ep 25Jan 202647 min

A single demographic statistic about car leasing sparked a project on how perceived romantic relationship stability shapes the choice to rent versus own.

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trending_up
Customer-Based Corporate Valuation with Dan McCarthy & Peter Fader
Ep 24Dec 202546 min

A conversation about valuing firms from customer behavior, including how publicly disclosed customer metrics can support market-level corporate valuation.

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storefront
How Fatal School Shootings Impact Local Economies
Ep 23Nov 202552 min

The authors explain how they extended evidence on grocery purchases into a broader story about anxiety, public consumption, and local economic spillovers.

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savings
Frugality Is Hard to Afford with Yesim Orhun & Mike Palazzolo
Ep 22Oct 202545 min

A close look at the poverty penalty and why some money-saving strategies are hardest to use when households are under the most financial pressure.

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Brands Speaking Slang with Bryce Pyrah & Alice Wang
Ep 21Sep 202548 min

What happens when brands try to sound like consumers, and how an uncertain early idea turned into a paper on the slang paradox.

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mic
How I Wrote This, Live in Chicago!
Ep 20Aug 202543 min

A live Summer AMA episode with authors of JMR award-winning articles on how collaboration, relevance, and perseverance shaped their work.

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visibility
Attention Spillovers from News to Ads with Andrey Simonov, Tommaso Valletti & Andre Veiga
Ep 19May 202549 min

An eye-tracking experiment born from pandemic-era advertiser block lists asks whether surrounding news content changes how audiences attend to ads.

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feed
Insights from Social Media Post Histories with Verena Schoenmueller & Simon Blanchard
Ep 18Apr 202547 min

A conversation about fake news prediction, post histories, and the broader research value hidden in the behavioral traces people leave on social platforms.

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Canary Categories with Ayelet Israeli & Eric Anderson
Ep 17Mar 202548 min

Some purchases can signal that a customer is less likely to return, and the episode walks through the authors’ complex revision path behind that finding.

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volunteer_activism
A Look Back on Corporate Social Responsibility with Sankar Sen
Ep 16Feb 202554 min

Sankar Sen revisits a foundational 2001 CSR paper and reflects on what it takes to build durable research streams around a big emerging topic.

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Ep. 15 Mini Part 2, How To Be a Good Reviewer
Ep 15Jan 202536 min

A special mini episode in which Brett and Karen unpack the review process and share practical lessons from current JMR reviewers.

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Ep. 15 Mini Part 1, The Lives of Co-Editors
Ep 15Jan 202523 min

A behind-the-scenes look at what it is actually like to serve as a journal co-editor and how that work shapes the research publication process.

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Do Switching Costs Make Markets Less Competitive? with JP Dube, Gunter Hitsch & Peter Rossi
Ep 14Dec 202439 min

The trio explain how their empirical results pushed back on long-standing theory and how they expanded the project in response to critical feedback.

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share
Rachel Gershon and Zhenling Jiang Talk Referral Contagion
Ep 13Nov 202429 min

Karen talks with the authors about combining behavioral and quantitative approaches to uncover the downstream benefits of customer referrals.

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palette
Generative Interpretable Visual Design with Ankit Sisodia, Alex Burnap & Vineet Kumar
Ep 12Oct 202446 min

A discussion of generative visual design, disentanglement, and how the authors built a visual conjoint approach for forthcoming JMR work.

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restaurant
Mitigating Food Waste with Huachao Gao, He (Michael) Jia & Bingxuan Guo
Ep 11Aug 202446 min

The season-two opener looks at how framing resources as available for me versus us changes behavior around consumer food waste.

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sell
Learning to Set Prices with Yufeng Huang, Paul Ellickson & Mitch Lovett
Ep 10May 202450 min

The season-one finale covers how firms learn to price dynamically and how the authors turned that question into a JMR paper on price setting.

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star
Star Ratings and Research Transparency with Annika Abell, Carter Morgan & Marisabel Romero
Ep 9Apr 202444 min

The authors discuss customer rating formats, magnitude perception, and what it was like complying with JMR’s research transparency policy.

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Joyce Liu and Anirban Mukhopadhyay on Favorite Possessions and Well-Being
Ep 8Mar 202439 min

A conversation about how favorite possessions can buffer feelings of deprivation under income inequality and how that idea sharpened over time.

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fact_check
Debunking Misinformation with Jessica Fong, Tong Guo & Anita Rao
Ep 7Feb 202433 min

The team explains how a conference encounter and early-pandemic misinformation led to a project on debunking false product claims.

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group
From Friends to Co-Authors with Kaitlin Woolley & Peggy Liu
Ep 6Jan 202433 min

A fast-moving collaboration on company size and product-quality inferences that grew from a set of possible ideas among friends.

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school
Harvard Business School’s Eva Ascarza
Ep 5Dec 202342 min

Brett talks with Eva Ascarza about retention futility, high-risk customer targeting, and how that research became a notable JMR publication.

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back_hand
How Vicarious Touch Made It from Hibernation to Publication
Ep 4Nov 202339 min

Andrea Webb Luangrath and Joann Peck explain how a decade-old seminar idea resurfaced and survived rejection on its way to publication.

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local_drink
Stephan Seiler, Anna Tuchman, and Song Yao Discuss Soda Taxes
Ep 3Sep 202352 min

An early rigorous evaluation of soda taxes, including pass-through, tax avoidance, nutritional effects, and the authors’ approach to review feedback.

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Martin Mende and Maura Scott Talk Service Robots
Ep 2Aug 202342 min

A memorable story about hauling a 600-pound robot through New York and substantially revising the paper after an initial rejection.

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reviews
Judy Chevalier and Dina Mayzlin on Online Reviews
Ep 1Aug 202340 min

The first episode revisits a post-seminar question that became an influential collaboration on online book reviews and later earned the O’Dell Award.

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