Deck the Halls with Sales and Discounts

A slow economy coupled with a financial crisis makes for a bleak retail outlook heading into the 2008 holiday shopping season. But retailers aren't going down without a fight, and they have some weapons in their arsenal as they strive to post respectable numbers. Professors of Marketing Claes Fornell and Aradhna Krishna see retailers driving deeper discounts, working harder to keep regular customers, changing marketing strategies, and employing some creative promotions this holiday season. And while 2008 will be one of the slowest holiday sales seasons in years, the numbers might not be as bad as some predict.

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Gerald Davis

The Quiet Consolidation

Quietly and with little fanfare, the ownership of hundreds of public companies in the United States has moved from being dispersed among many players to being concentrated in the hands of a just a few. But it's not big banks that are dominating corporate ownership, as in the past. Instead it's mutual funds that hold almost 30 percent of U.S. corporate ownership today, compared with 8 percent in 1990, according to research by Professor of Management and Organizations Gerald Davis.

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Award Winner Hess Discusses Current Research

Assistant Professor of Business Law David Hess focuses his research on the role of the law in ensuring corporate accountability and on approaches that enable corporations to go beyond legal compliance to meet the expectations of society with respect to ethical behavior and sustainable economic development. He recently took home the 2008 Faculty Pioneer Award from the Aspen Institute Center for Business Education. The annual recognition, dubbed the "Oscars of the business school world" by the Financial Times, celebrates MBA faculty who have demonstrated leadership and risk-taking in integrating social and environment issues into academic research, educational programs, and business practice.

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Not Lost in Translation

Advertisers pushing products in bilingual countries generally focus on how best to turn a phrase or coin a slogan. But they should be spending time determining the actual language that best suits their product, according to new research by Aradhna Krishna, Isadore and Leon Winkelman Professor of Retail Marketing. "Language Choice in Advertising to Bilinguals" is one of the first studies to explore the consequences of language choice in commercial campaigns. Krishna developed the research agenda as she noticed international firms selling more and more products around the world -- and being exposed for the first time to bilingual (and even trilingual) consumers. Companies advertising in India, for example, might speak to customers in Hindi or English -- or a mixture of the two.

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