How I Wrote This podcast cover art — a warmly lit desk cluttered with books, papers, and a glowing monitor

How I Wrote This

With Brett Gordon & Karen Winterich

A podcast about how academic marketing papers go from first idea to publication.

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Transformers for Customer Journeys

Ep 33BrettOct 202645 min

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

Graduate School of Business, Stanford

KW

Karen Winterich

Smeal, Penn State

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Episodes

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Latest episode

Transformer Models for Customer Journeys with Zipei Lu and P.K. Kannan

Ep 33Oct 202645 min

Brett talks with Zipei Lu and P.K. Kannan about their JMR paper that treats a hospitality firm’s customer touchpoints like words in a sentence and fits a transformer whose attention patterns vary by customer. The conversation also covers the paper’s path across journals before JMR and what the authors learned from industry feedback.

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Untangling Colorism with Tanuka Ghoshal and Tripat Gill

Ep 32Sep 202655 min

Karen talks with Tanuka Ghoshal and Tripat Gill about their paper on skin tone and perceptions of service providers in India. Despite the documented fair-skin premium, darker-skinned professionals are seen as more hardworking, and so more competent, in financial and technical services. The conversation also covers eight years and seven rounds of revision, and the costs of collecting quality data in India.

From Rejection to Recognition: The Story Behind Two JMR Award-Winning Papers

Ep 31Aug 202647 min

Recorded at Summer AMA with the 2026 JMR award winners: Shiri Melumad and Robert Meyer on how listening versus reading changes the way consumers interpret news, and Stephan Seiler and Anna Tuchman on why their soda-tax paper found an audience across marketing, economics, and public health.

The Next Chapter at JMR: A Conversation with Raphael Thomadsen

Ep 30Jul 202652 min

Brett and Karen talk with incoming JMR Editor-in-Chief Raphael Thomadsen about the new team’s vision for the journal: streamlining the revision process, accepting shorter-form articles, and bridging behavioral, managerial, and quantitative work.

Ep 29Jun 202656 min

A send-off episode with the five outgoing JMR co-editors, including hosts Brett and Karen, reflecting on their term: the hardest calls they made, the biases they caught in themselves, and what they wish authors knew about working with an editor.

The Open Design Effect with Martin Schreier & Darren Dahl

Ep 28Apr 202662 min

Karen talks with Martin Schreier and Darren Dahl about why firms like Allbirds give away proprietary designs, and how “inside-out” openness raises consumers’ willingness to pay.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.