A Revolution in Marketing

Cover A Revolution in Marketing

A Revolution in

Marketing

22 Chicago Booth Magazine Spring 2OO9

A Revolution in

Marketing

How Chicago Is Going Beyond the Buzz The days of the big, splashy television commercial are not over. But the ads have become part of an expanding and more exacting set of marketing tactics—viral videos, Twitter feeds, and customized messages—that companies use to connect with consumers.

Explosions in technology have given marketers unparalleled freedom in how they promote a brand, and as a result, marketing is undergoing a revolution. Firms now start by developing a finely honed marketing strategy for a brand and end by capturing measurable results with hard data—an approach that has long been in fashion at Chicago Booth. In fact, an unprecedented amount of data will be available this year with ACNielsen’s new agreement to share household panel data with Chicago Booth’s Marketing Data Center, putting the school at the forefront of marketing for the 21st century. By Patricia Houlihan

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Cover A Revolution in Marketing

E

verybody loves a great ad. Done well, it not only moves more product, it also generates conversation around the water cooler at the office and even media buzz.

This was the case with the Doritos 30-second television commercial during the 2007 Super Bowl, a humorous episode that showed a cute couple meeting after a fender-bender induced by their mutual love for the snack chip. What drew the media spotlight was the fact that it had been made by a Doritos fan and was the winner of a competition sponsored by Frito-Lay, a gutsy move that deepened the brand’s relationship with its 16- to 24-year-old consumers. The innovative shift has shaped the firm’s approach to Super Bowl advertising, and the contest is now an annual event. This year, the consumer’s ad for Doritos actually beat out all other ads to place number-one in the two most-watched Superbowl polls in USA Today and YouTube, proving that “taking risks and doing marketing differently can pay huge dividends,” said Ann Mukherjee, ’94, group vice president for marketing at Frito-Lay North America, who led the effort.

“Frito-Lay has large, mature brands. To drive ongoing growth of something this big, we had to move beyond traditional marketing,” she said. For the Super Bowl, she said, “we bought a TV spot and said to consumers, ‘You create an ad. We won’t edit it. And we’ll let other consumers pick the winner, which we’ll put on the largest advertising stage possible.’ That’s the kind of fundamental shift we’ve created at Frito-Lay.” Being able to lead a team of executives to consider the strategy is where her training at Chicago Booth came into play, Mukherjee said. “That’s where I learned to look at a business holistically and understand the economic value that marketing drove within that model.

Marketing is not a support function; marketing becomes a key enabler for understanding how to generate sustainable growth for a business.

In the changing environment that we live in today, you have to be nimble enough to drive different frameworks and keep ahead of the pace.”

Mukherjee’s experience illustrates how Chicago Booth’s approach to marketing is not only changing the field, it’s also shaping the world of business. Peter Rossi, Joseph T. and Bernice S. Lewis Professor of Marketing and Statistics, said,

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“What distinguishes Chicago Booth marketing is a melding of models and data. We are not content to simply describe or measure the effects of marketing actions; we also optimize the use of marketing funds. We bring the results of that research to the classroom. That’s where Chicago Booth students learn how to apply innovative marketing theory in a way that marketing becomes a key driver of business growth.”

Taking an innovative route is something David Appel, AB ’81, MBA ’82, understands in a way few marketers do.

Currently CEO of Vision LLC, he left Accenture to join the family business, Orange Glo, the cleaning products firm that beat such industry giants as Clorox with its innovative marketing of OxiClean. Promoted through infomercials, the stain remover captured a majority of the U.S. retail market, making it the first mass-distribution consumer product to succeed using that channel. Annual revenue exceeded $300 million before Orange Glo was sold in 2006.

Appel thinks of himself as a marketer, although he led that company and now heads two other firms. His concentration at Chicago Booth included finance and accounting as well as marketing. “The best marketers have a complete view of the business and understand everything about bringing a product to market, because if you’re not the leader of the business, who is?” he said. “Quantitative tools help you make good marketing decisions. How do you decide what makes a company valuable? You try to create a brand that’s worth something and repeatable and sustainable and has fairly limited competitive threats.”

Managing a Brand—or a Company

Among those who have a master grasp of brand potential is James Kilts, ’74, who built a reputation and a career on his ability to rejuvenate stagnant brands and revitalize troubled corporations. He has restored the flagging sales of KoolAid, Oscar Mayer, Oreo, Life Savers, Kraft cheese, and Planters peanuts. When Nabisco named him president and CEO in 1998, its market share for brands representing 90 percent of the company’s U.S. sales was declining. In just 18 months, Kilts engineered a turnaround that resulted in market share growing for 90 percent of its brands. His success attracted the

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“What’s important is understanding how to turn

attention of the Gillette Company, which appointed Kilts chairman and CEO in 2001, the first outsider to run the firm in 70 years. The razor and battery maker had missed its quarterly earnings estimates for four years; its stock had plummeted 62 percent in two years. Kilts led a turnaround and sold Gillette to Procter & Gamble for $57 billion in 2005.

“What’s important is understanding how to turn data into information and knowing how to make decisions about the results,” he said. “At Chicago, I learned to be very analytical, to absorb as many facts as possible, and then [to] extract direction and, ultimately, conclusions from those facts.” Kilts, who gave the naming gift for the James M. Kilts Center for Marketing at Chicago Booth, describes his experiences in the book, Doing What Matters: How to Get Results That Make a Difference—The Revolutionary Old-School Approach. “There are a lot of generalizations about consumers that everyone is fond of making, but what you really have to do is understand how the consumer thinks in the context of your category,” Kilts explained. “You need to know the consumer’s wants, needs, and tradeoffs, and that requires good analytical work—both qualitative research and, importantly, quantitative research.”

Now a partner at Centerview Partners, an investment banking and private equity firm, Kilts said marketing remains his passion. “It’s all about finding the fundamental connection with consumers, making sure all the programs and communication around the brand are focused on linking with those consumers and their fundamental needs, and making those needs relevant to today’s marketplace.”

Today’s marketers say analytics have become even more relevant, said David Knoepfle, ’03, marketing manager at Wm. Wrigley Jr. Company. “One of the common challenges we face is a constant pressure to justify the expenditures we make and to ensure our programs are giving our shareholders an adequate rate of return,” he said. “It goes back to ROI. With the economy this tough, having a strong understanding of the P&L for the program you’re putting into place and the return it will give you is key. Having people who are well versed in analyzing

data into information and knowing how to make decisions about the results.”—James Kilts, ’74 the business and analyzing the decisions we make is a definite asset at any time, but particularly in a down economy.”

Broad Audience for the Chicago Approach

In teaching strategic marketing, faculty drive home the fundamentals of how to run a business. “The fundamentals don’t change because of trends like the internet or because we’re in a recession. There’s no new set of principles,” said JeanPierre Dubé, Sigmund E. Edelstone Professor of Marketing.

Marketing faculty at Chicago Booth focus their research on typical problems—advertising, pricing, customer segmentation, customer preferences. But with economics as the basis for forming theories and constructing models, the papers are published in top marketing, economics, statistics, and psychology journals, giving Chicago Booth research a broader audience—and a broader impact.

In fact, Dubé; Sanjay Dhar, James H. Lorie Professor of Marketing; and Bart Bronnenberg shared the 2008 Paul E. Green Award for their study “Consumer Packaged Goods in the United States: National Brands, Local Branding,” which documented striking geographic patterns in the performance of national brands. Two coffee brands, Folgers and Maxwell House, dominate the U.S. market with roughly equal shares of volume sold. However, in some regions, Folgers garners considerably more share than Maxwell House; in other regions, the situation is reversed. “We went through company archives and traced when these brands rolled out in different cities,” Dubé said. “We did this for several product categories and found that being the first to roll out in these markets—sometimes over a century ago—is a very good predictor of whether a brand has the highest market share in that market today. This incredible degree of persistence is surprising both for academics and for brand managers in these categories.”

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Cover A Revolution in Marketing In a follow-up study, Dubé and Matthew Gentzkow, associate professor of economics and Neubauer Family Faculty Fellow, are working with co-author Bronnenberg on why history would persist in the current performance of a brand.

“We’ve obtained shopping data on 75,000 households across the country from ACNielsen, then surveyed these households about the city where the primary shopper was born, was educated, and currently resides. We’re studying whether people buy the brands that are popular where they currently live versus where they grew up; we’re testing whether shoppers take their brand preferences with them when they move to a region that has different brand-buying habits.”

Enriching the Marketing Data Center

Faculty have gained an important step toward having even greater access to data this year. Nielsen agreed to share its household panel data with Chicago Booth and to update it annually. Housed at the Kilts Center, the Marketing Data Center—created by Rossi with the help of Kilts—will enable Chicago to develop the first longitudinal marketing data sets available for academic study and classroom use.

“Over time, we’ll be able to accumulate a data set that is unique and will allow us to answer questions people have posed that were unanswerable in the past,” Rossi said. “Traditional marketing research has been viewed as one-off studies, but this data set will help managers understand how things might evolve rather than just focusing on the next quarter.

We’ll have a confluence of data and models, and to bring science to marketing, you need both.”

The Marketing Data Center puts Chicago Booth on the map as the premier source for marketing data in the world. “If you really understand marketing, it’s clear that a revolution is taking place,” said dean Edward Snyder.

“It’s moving from people with some judgment, anecdotes, and stories to professionals with deep insights into markets and organizations who can use more sophisticated tools and data to draw even more insights from broadbased experiments that let them evaluate data, test results, and improve performance.”

That revolution, Snyder said, is going to happen at Chicago Booth. “We have the faculty, and now we’ll have the data from Nielsen. We’re deep into experiments with such faculty as Steven Levitt [William B. Ogden Distinguished Service

Professor in Economics and the College] and such experiential learning as Management Lab, Marketing Research, and Consumer Behavior,” courses designed to prepare students for roles where marketing integrates with other business functions to drive growth. “Hopefully, we’ll have partnerships with other schools that will generate even more data, ensuring flow from different product sets and geographies,” Snyder said.

Nielsen data will allow more and better quantitative market research, an area where Chicago Booth faculty have taken top prizes.

Associate professor of marketing Günter Hitsch won the Frank M. Bass Award from the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) in 2007 for his research on dynamic decision models, a frontier area for marketing. “I’ve been able to make progress by advancing statistical methods, especially computational techniques that allow me to tackle previously unsolvable, complex decision problems,” he explained. Much of his research focuses on dynamic marketing strategies, i.e., situations where marketing decisions that firms make today have effects on future sales, profits, and competitive reactions.

In the paper “Tipping And Concentration in Markets With Indirect Network Effects” that Hitsch coauthored with Dubé and Pradeep Chintagunta, Robert Law Professor of Marketing, they noted that sudden shifts in market share are likely

“We’ll have a confluence of data and models, and to bring science to marketing, you need both.”—Professor Peter Rossi

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in industries that have competing yet incompatible standards. In the market for video game consoles, for instance, the industry is characterized by “indirect network effects”—the positive feedback loop in which increased hardware sales result in more software titles, which, in turn, increase hardware sales. As a result, indirect network effects can cause a market to “tip” quickly in favor of one standard.

They developed a model calibrated with data from the

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Some Indications that the Revolution Is Under Way Here are highlights of the revolutionary approach to marketing that is under way— approaches led by Chicago Booth.

O ld A pproach

Re volutionary A pproach

Reliance on survey data

Insights from marketplace data

Focus on outcomes of consumer decisions

Examine the process consumers use to make decisions

Measuring marketing effects

Optimizing marketing activities

Use descriptive models

Use models based on behavioral processes

Focus on short-run profitability

Emphasize drivers of long-term value

video game console market that generates predictions that can be used to measure the extent of tipping. In that market, he said, this tipping depends on consumers’ valuations of software and on consumer expectations. The work was one of several papers presented at the Quantitative Marketing and Economics (QME) conference in 2007, hosted by the Kilts Center, Chicago Booth, INFORMS Society for Marketing Science, and Springer, publisher of the QME journal.

The latest faculty accomplishments build on a tradition of innovative marketing research at Chicago. For instance, Rossi proved the value of targeted couponing based on household purchase histories, which he outlined in the paper “The Value of Purchase History Data in Target Marketing,” published in Marketing Science in 1996. Rossi and other faculty in the statistics group pioneered advanced modeling methods that facilitate the estimation of large-scale models—modeling used by DemandTec, which makes software that helps manufacturers and such retailers as Wal-Mart and PETCO predict consumer demand and develop strategies for pricing and promotions.

Among alumni who employ the analytical approach are Dhiraj Rajaram, ’03, founder and CEO of Mu Sigma, a pioneer in analytics outsourcing and data-driven decision making, and Dick Buell, ’78, chairman and CEO of Catalina Marketing, which triggers promotions and advertisements

based on the consumer’s purchase behavior (either UPC scans or ID cards) that are delivered at the point of sale.

Preparing the Next Generation of Marketers

Faculty take their research into the classroom, and also gain insight from students, said Dubé, who teaches pricing. “Every year, I try to add something new related to my research.

While the class content is getting richer each year, it’s also getting slightly harder, but the students always rise to the challenge.” Students also inform faculty research by sharing what goes on in the field. “We’ve nailed consumer behavior, but firms don’t always behave the way we would predict with our theories,” he said.

Coursework laid the foundation quickly for Jessica Lindor, a career-changing first-year student who landed a marketing internship at Kraft. “The Marketing Strategy course gave me the entire framework for analyzing problems. In my Data-Driven Marketing course, we used Nielsen data, so I understood what all the terms meant before I got to Kraft.”

Assigned to the California Pizza Kitchen (CPK) brand, she had three assignments, including bringing the consumer to life. “I came up with the idea of creating a website, which was so well-received that I spent my last week on the road, showing it to people outside the brand team. That was great because I saw it wasn’t just an internship project, it was a tool that could be used by everybody at Kraft who needed a really good understanding of the consumer in the years to come.” n

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Cover A Revolution in Marketing

The Branding of the Gift The strategy behind the naming of Chicago Booth

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avid Booth, ’71, provisionally agreed in the summer of

2008 to give a gift that could change the name of his alma mater. Although the change hinged on approval from the University of Chicago Board of Trustees that fall, dean Edward Snyder and executive director of marketing Chris Iannuccilli immediately embarked upon a massive, secret effort over 20 weeks to rename the school—provided the vote was favorable.

Their first step was to quickly convene a steering committee comprised of deputy deans Richard Leftwich, Mark Zmijewski, and Stacey Kole to guide the renaming and plan its announcement. They also sought out Gary I. Singer, ’78, founder of Redline Results, for his renaming expertise and corporate branding experience, and Bart Crosby of Crosby Associates, who had designed the school’s wordmark and brand identity a decade ago. Singer conducted stakeholder interviews with the steering committee, Booth, former deans Robert Hamada and Jack Gould, and key alumnus James Kilts, ’74, to see where everyone aligned and diverged.

Selecting the school’s name was a major step, one that involved much discussion among committee members who heard several recommendations, debated them, and resolved them. “The steering group recognized that David’s generous gift offered the school the opportunity to help close its reputational gap,” Singer said. “Moving from the combination of a place name (Chicago) and the generic description of what the school does (graduate school of business) to the right name that offered the potential to create a more ownable brand was an important decision treated with Chicago-style seriousness and rigor.”

After lengthy consideration, the committee also decided to replace the word “graduate” with Booth’s last name. “By deciding to drop ‘graduate,’ we join the brands that have left the name of what they do behind—Apple Computers is now Apple, which has allowed it to be so much more,” Iannuccilli said.

“Ultimately, we chose the University of Chicago Booth School of Business as the formal name and Chicago Booth as a common version that could eventually be shortened further to Booth. The committee members agreed that this was the best direction for the school.”

As a marketer, Iannuccilli was charged with the next steps: develop a messaging strategy for the name change (and, effectively, for the school), create a new visual identity, craft a media strategy that maximized the window of interest created by the gift and naming, develop advertising to splash the new name, launch a new website, and change the building signage on four campuses. Additional “wrinkles” included announcing the

“We knew we had to maximize the moment when the spotlight was on us.”—Chris Iannuccilli

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gift publicly three days after a presidential election and a day after Chicago Booth would be defending its number-one ranking as the country’s best business school when BusinessWeek released its biannual report. And the announcement had to be kept secret until members of the University of Chicago Board of Trustees voted on it.

What Works

The steering committee also agreed upon key points, which provided focus and momentum, Iannuccilli said. For instance, closing both the brand and endowment gaps was the most strategic imperative for the school, and continuing to embrace and celebrate its rich heritage, values, and accomplishments was essential. “Our key competitive advantage is our outstanding faculty, who are the drivers of past and future success. We realized the renaming gift gave us a unique opportunity to clarify what makes the school meaningfully distinctive, and to tell our story more crisply and concisely,” he said. Finally, committee members knew that implementation would have to be bold and aggressive.

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Successfully creating or strengthening a brand begins with identifying core characteristics, and Singer had led numerous firms through this exercise, including McDonald’s, as one of the leading branding experts at Leo Burnett, D’Arcy, McKinsey, and Interbrand. “Chicago is one of the places where you can come up with a long list of attributes, too,” Singer said.

“Ultimately, we identified three core values: intellectual rigor and debate, continuous ideas that shape business, and people who create lasting value.” Well-identified, the values strike a resounding chord with everyone who has a stake in the brand, both internal and external constituencies.

Crosby, who had been involved early in the process, was given free rein to develop the new visual identity, a blank slate in terms of colors, fonts, looks, and treatment. “We explored hundreds of them,” Iannuccilli said. “It was an opportunity to address all sorts of brand evolutions and needs.” The new identity was selected both for its link to the nowfamiliar Chicago GSB logo, but also for its bold, streamlined, graphic presence that’s easily adaptable to a range of uses, from signage to gear, he said.

Communications strategy for the November 7 launch was planned and executed by select high-level staff who worked with trusted, longtime partners. University-wide public relations professionals including Allan Friedman of Chicago Booth gave the Wall Street Journal, Chicago Tribune, and New York Times access to key sources in exchange for an embargoed story, then handled the media-wide announcement. Alumni affairs staff arranged for a champagne toast with full-time students, faculty, and staff in the Rothman Winter Garden—a surprise announced 30 minutes earlier. Marketing staff prepared a special issue of the magazine and developed a web microsite, homepage rotation, and email notifications. Building signage was created and was installed overnight. “We were able to rely on vendors and partners we had worked with for years,” Iannuccilli said. We said, ‘The gift could be jeopardized if this gets out. We have to give the trustees the ability to vote on it.’”

The culmination came at 5:23 pm, when Snyder made the official announcement and the Wall Street Journal sent an email blast to millions of subscribers with the news, Iannuccilli said.

“I got it on my iPhone when I was in the winter garden.”

Spreading the Word

Full-page ads ran immediately. Media around the world picked up the story. And BusinessWeek postponed its ranking announcement by one week, enabling Chicago Booth to gain extra time in the spotlight when the school maintained its number-one status. “We got a bit lucky on the media front, but we were ready,” he said. “We knew we had to maximize the moment when the spotlight was on us.”

Executing from that point forward was key. “We weren’t able to bring alumni, students, or faculty into the decisionmaking process ahead of time, so it had to be done well,” Iannuccilli said. By 7 a.m. the following day, much of the signage at Chicago Booth’s four campuses had been changed. “We wanted students to be proud of their school and to see this was the way we were going to move forward. And we gave away gear immediately so they could start participating in it and become part of it. We couldn’t do that with 43,000 alumni but we sent out the special issue, and Ted had an online chat.

We wanted them to get to know David, to learn how he based his investment management approach on the efficient markets theory of Gene Fama, which led to the incredible success of Dimensional Fund Advisors. It was perfect for us to rename ourselves after David.”—P.H. Learn more about the renaming effort at ChicagoBooth. edu/booth/, or recapture the excitement of the November 7 announcement by going to ChicagoBooth.edu/ontheweb and entering the keyword “excitement.” See what’s new in Chicago Booth gear at ChicagoBooth.edu/store.

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Cover A Revolution in Marketing

Building a 21st-Century Brand Using a renaming opportunity to boost brand equity

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n the constant battle for brand recognition, renaming a brand presents a rare opportunity: a time of heightened visibility and a chance to re-tell a brand’s timeless story in a way that’s fresh and forward-looking. Those who do it well find a balance between celebrating the brand’s heritage and jump-starting it with an aspirational push—and avoid the pitfalls along the way.

Successful marketers know that every discussion about managing a brand starts at the same place: defining in simple terms what truly makes it meaningfully distinctive. “First, you have to understand what makes the brand timeless to begin with,” said Ann Mukherjee, ’94, group vice president for marketing at Frito-Lay North America.

“What are some of the things that are non-negotiable in terms of what the brand represents?”

The answer “drives value in everything you do,” said Gary I. Singer, ’78, founder of Redline Results, a branding consulting firm. “You can use it as a decision-making tool to decide what your priorities are, as an alignment to get your employees to figure out what’s important to do when they get to work, as a tool to sharpen your go-to-market offerings— the products or services you sell and what makes you different.

And it goes beyond the functional. It also includes the tenor of the place, the DNA.” In changing a brand’s name, organizations that manage the transition successfully are able to link the new name with the long-standing core attributes. When a donation from an individual renames an organization, the new name is a particularly good fit if the donor’s personal story illustrates the organization’s core values. Such is the case with Booth, said noted turnaround expert James Kilts, ’74, now a partner at Centerview Partners. “David epitomizes the values of the school.

He’s a financial expert, an entrepreneur, and a great marketer.

And as he says, he owes all those characteristics to his success

at the university,” Kilts said. Ann McGill, Sears Roebuck Professor of General Management, Marketing, and Behavioral Science, echoed the sentiment. “David is the Chicago Booth School of Business.”

Managing Mistakes

Singer admits it’s easy to get caught up in the search for the “perfect” name. He recalled a point working on a project for McDonald’s when it was decided to take a pass on “an answer that was really elegant and cool—and if you wrote it up in a marketing textbook, people would say, ‘That’s really exciting’—for another answer that was probably 70 to 80 percent

“The real trick is to come up with a brand name and a process that engage the right people in the right way so that they’re enthusiastic about it and support it and give it momentum.”—Gary I. Singer, ’78

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as good as the first one but was more likely to be embraced by several critical internal constituents. Mary Dillon, McDonald’s chief marketing officer, made the smart call that getting successful adoption and implementation was a lot more powerful than coming up with a really cool answer.”

Singer says that in most cases, “there are probably three or four names that are good enough. The real trick is to come up with a brand name and a process that engage the right people in the right way so that they’re enthusiastic about it and support it and give it momentum.”

Firms that use renaming to try to solve a business problem, such as a poor public image, do not succeed. “I don’t know how many years it’s been since Philip Morris changed its name to Altria,” Singer said. “To this day, I hear people

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say, ‘Altria, formerly Philip Morris.’ What did they accomplish? They’ve actually heightened the fact they’re a cigarette company, as opposed to diminishing it.” Mukherjee called it “being apologetic.” She said, “They’ll become apologetic for who they are and try to stand for something they’re not. Great marketing isn’t giving people a different answer, it’s helping them reframe the way they’re thinking about the question.”

Companies also invariably fail when they try to attach the new name to something that lacks the core characteristics. Longtime marketer Rishad Tobaccowala, ’82, now CEO of Denuo, recalled Coca-Cola’s disastrous introduction of New Coke.

“What they tried to do was keep the same name with a new moniker, which was New Coke, but make a drink that was more like Pepsi. In that particular case, what Coke stood for was consistency and a link through time, so it was not just a formula of water and cola.

“In effect, by saying there’s Coca-Cola and there’s New Coke, it was basically the equivalent of saying, ‘There are two business schools: there’s the GSB and now there is Booth, and you can choose between the two flavors.’ It was a very bad case of Coke trying to rename and rebrand at the same time, not knowing what the hell they were doing. In the case of Booth, we do not have the same problem that Coke had. In our case, what the school stands for remains the same and, in fact, is reinforced by the new name since David is a successful product of the school’s philosophy and belief in analytics, markets, and new knowledge.”

with. At Gillette when we introduced our new Mach3 razor, our target audience was 18- to 25-year-olds because they were the quickest to adopt. We didn’t convert a lot of people over 50, although we converted some,” Kilts said. “You’re always

“First, you have to understand what makes the brand timeless to begin with.”

—Ann Mukherjee, ’94

Meeting Challenges Head-On

Even done well, renaming brings challenges for the best of marketers. Consumers become attached to names, Mukherjee said. “We think it’s just a name, but for some people, it represents something, and it’s important we understand what it represents.”

Kilts pointed out that the younger the audience, the more quickly they adapt.

“In some cases, it takes a while because there’s a connection to history and what you grew up

going to have that with a major name change. That shouldn’t bother you. It’s just the nature of business and the nature of consumer behavior.”

In addressing the issue, Singer said it’s important to consider it “from the perspective of all key constituents, including the internal constituency, which is often overlooked but is very important. How is this going to make people feel? How is it going to help them do their job better?” In the case of Chicago Booth, Singer said, “we looked at current and prospective students, faculty, alumni, current and prospective recruiters, and current and prospective contributors to the school. It’s important to think about it quite broadly in terms of the constituents involved.”

Faculty were among the early adopters at Chicago Booth, said Sanjay Dhar, James H. Lorie Professor of Marketing. “The reason David Booth gave this money is that he established this partnership, as he calls it, with the school many years ago.

And he is a person who reinforces what the school stands for.

My first reaction when I heard why he had given the money was that my teaching job becomes a lot easier now. I can tell students, ‘The impact of what I teach you may be pushing you to think in the fundamental core values of Chicago, which is that discussion and debate leads to the creation of new knowledge. In David Booth, you see someone who’s successful and who acknowledges that, and this is the reason he supports us.’

I think it’s a real reinforcement of what the school stands for, and why we teach here and not at another school.”—P.H.

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