What are some of the reasons why you decided to attend Fordham?
I decided to seriously consider Fordham as an option when I knew that I wanted to go to business school. As a native New Yorker, I knew how many internship and work experiences it would open for me. I found it hard to wrap my head around moving away from one of the world’s most prominent centers of business when I knew I wanted to do a business degree. The contacts I made initially at Fordham, as well as the Gabelli program, instantly impressed me when I visited and helped me decide to commit to Fordham for my undergraduate studies.

What do you think you got at Fordham that you couldn’t have gotten elsewhere?
The global opportunities and experiences that Fordham provided were absolutely incredible. I cannot speak highly enough of the Fordham London program in particular, which did a wonderful job of immersing us in the culture and providing us with a holistic experience of living and working in England. Although Fordham also has an extensive list of partner programs at other schools, such as the one I did at University College Dublin, having a sister campus abroad made [doing] my coursework stress-free. I would recommend it to anyone studying at Fordham, and in particular, I’d recommend taking a theatre class in London.

What Fordham course has had the greatest influence on you and your career path so far? How and why was it so influential?
I took several marketing classes with Timothy Malefyt, which heavily influenced me to go into marketing and the agency world in particular. His perspective on branding was a joy to learn about, and his experiences in the agency field were very helpful for setting expectations of what a career would look like after college.

Who is the Fordham professor or person you admire the most, and why?
Father Vincent DeCola, assistant dean for the B.S. in global business. He truly works so hard to ensure that each and every one of his students is on the right path and employs incredible attention to detail when getting to know his students. His dedication to the student body at Gabelli, and at Fordham as a whole, is so inspiring and had a huge impact on my time there. I owe him so much for making my experience at Fordham highly tailored and very special.

Did you have any internships helped put you on your current path? What were they, and how did they prepare you for what you’re doing now?
Most influential for me was my time at Fwd, which introduced me to how marketing and branding strategists actually work. As an intern at fwd., I did a host of things, including research, conducting interviews, trend monitoring, and more. That internship really helped me learn how to talk to people through the lens of work, which became particularly important when I onboarded to my current company, Ruder Finn, remotely.

What are you optimistic about?
Despite the challenges of the past couple of years due to the pandemic, I’m very optimistic about the future of our world and the future of work. I would attribute this to a massive increase in empathy across the board. In New York City in particular, I’ve seen how much people are taking care of each other and their communities. I’m optimistic about how this shift in mindset will manifest in our personal lives and in the work-life balance that we accept as a societal norm. I think people are more inclined to really care about how they impact and can support their communities and their friends—it’s encouraging to see this shift in mindset.

Is there anything else we should know about you, your plans, or your Fordham connection?
I would like to acknowledge the amazing Global Business Honors Program, as well as Dean Brian Dunn and Jennifer O’Neil, who made my time at Fordham so special. The honors program granted me some incredible opportunities, such as traveling on business trips to London, Beijing, and Santiago. I am forever thankful for the many ways that Fordham expanded my world and the incredible opportunities to hear speakers from top businesses [and have] cultural experiences.

Interview conducted, edited, and condensed by Adam Kaufman, FCLC ’08.

Wojciechowski had previously interned for the fashion website Moda Operandi, and when she enrolled to study in London this spring, she thought she might continue in that vein. But when a placement manager mentioned that Arden needed an intern in their public relations department, she jumped at the opportunity.

The internship, has given her the opportunity to wear many different hats, she said recently by phone from Clerkenwell, where the London campus is based.

“I’ve been lucky that they include me in a lot of the creative brainstorming aspects for influencer gifts and different campaigns that they’re working on. I’ve definitely got a very active role there, which has been really nice. It’s not just making copies,” she said.

“I take all of the coverage that we get, compile it and send it to everybody in London that works for Arden. That’s been cool too, because they give me a lot of responsibility, which I’m grateful for.”

As part of the cosmetics firm’s London team, Wojciechowski has helped coordinate outreach efforts on the brand’s social media platforms, outreach to “influencers,” and the tracking of the success of those outreach efforts—skills that are applicable in other industries. And although her major is in marketing, she said the Gabelli School’s core curriculum has served her well, as she’s been able to discuss things like finance with her colleagues.

“The Gabelli core definitely prepares you for work in general,” she said.

Wojciechowski spent the semester in London as part of Fordham’s Study Abroad program. Living there isn’t dramatically different from living in New York, she said. The city is cleaner and the pace is slower, she’s noticed. And of course, she’s learned to take the “lift” instead of an elevator, and to be extra careful crossing the street, as cars drive on the left side.

In addition to splitting time between classes and her internship, Wojciechowski has made pilgrimages across the English Channel to Lisbon, Copenhagen, Milan, and Rome. When she is exploring London, Hyde Park, which is a short hop from where she lives, is her favorite haunt.

“I have always been a runner, so it’s really nice to be able to just walk there. I can also go for a run in the morning and after class or something. I just like the park, to get away from the city a little bit,” she said.

Wojciechowski has plans when she returns stateside to intern with New Era, a sports apparel  company in Buffalo this summer. But merry old England has treated her well.

“I really like London. Elizabeth Arden is awesome, the people there are super friendly. It’s been a really good experience for me.”

The group, which visited from January 6 to 11, was there for Applied Design Thinking, a new course being taught this semester by Janet DiLorenzo, Ed.D., clinical assistant professor of marketing at the Gabelli School of Business.

“When we teach new product development, we talk about how you come up with ideas, then test the concept, test market it, and then launch it,” DiLorenzo said.

“Design thinking is a very similar concept, except you never give up. Even when your product is in the market, you keep experimenting to make sure it’s working.”

Disney World is the ideal place to observe the concept, she said, because the Disney company is renowned for its human-centered approach, epitomized in the book One Little Spark! Mickey’s Ten Commandments and the Road to Imagineering (Disney Publishing, 2015), by Martin Sklar.

Sklar’s book was required reading for the class before their trip. When students arrived, one of their assignments was to apply commandments such as “Communicate with visual literacy” to an aspect of the Magic Kingdom.

“They weren’t just going on rides. They were trying to figure out how design thinking was applicable to Disney. They had to gather as much secondary and primary data as they could when they were there,” said DiLorenzo.

For Fordham College at Rose Hill senior Nicole Berni, the trip was an opportunity to see in a very different light a place she has visited, by her own estimate, 20 times. Berni, an international political economy major who is minoring in marketing at the Gabelli School, was drawn to the course by the Disney connection and came away with an appreciation for design thinking.

“What I really enjoyed about it is, it’s not just ‘Let me sell you something for the sake of selling you something,’ but ‘Let me think of you as an individual person, and what can I do to create the most utility and the most happiness?’” she said.

“It’s not a linear process where you have a product at the end of the day. You keep coming back to the starting point and making sure you’re keeping up with what your goal was.”

With Sklar’s 10 commandments serving as their framework, students were tasked with identifying something at each of the Disney parks deserving of a “Mouscar,” which is the company’s in-house award (think mouse plus Oscar). They also had to identify something that deserved a “Goof” (the opposite of a Mouscar), and then suggest improvements. Their final paper for the class will be their plan for improvements.

Berni and her partner took the commandment “Keep it up. Maintain it. Keep it relevant.” and applied it to the Grand Fiesta Tour at Epcot.

“It’s a fun enough ride, but we’re going to take something new, running off the movie Coco, and create a new ride that gives more modern relevance to the pavilion,” she said.

Jacklyn Onody, a junior at the Gabelli School majoring in business administration, and her partner, trained their sights on Spaceship Earth, also at Epcot. The ride showcases technological improvements over the years, but stops short of the most recent innovations, she said.

“We’re hoping to incorporate virtual reality and artificial intelligence into it to make it more fun, but also educational at the same time. Epcot is due to undergo renovations, so we thought this would be a good renovation,” she said.

The students didn’t just wander around the public areas of the park during their time. Keys to the Kingdom, a five-hour behind-the-scenes tour, took them into the underground “Utilidor” tunnels that allow people and supplies to travel unseen beneath the park. They also attended classes taught by Disney employees on culture, teamwork, leadership, and design thinking.

Greer Jason-DiBartolo, Ph.D., associate dean for academic administration at Gabelli, said the latter was what drew her to propose the visit to DiLorenzo. Design thinking piqued her interest, she said, in conversations at conferences for AshokaU, the consortium of schools dedicated to fostering social good and strengthening society that Fordham joined in 2014.

“Social innovation is a differentiator for us, and design thinking is a tool used by social innovators, so I thought we should really expose as many students as possible to this,” she said.

“Disney may not be a model of a socially innovative company, but their decisions are human-centered because it’s all about the customer experience. Certainly, they’re open to experimentation and coming up with new things.”

Although Jason-DiBartolo joked that looking at the parks in such an intensely analytical way kind of ruined Disney for her, Berni said she was unfazed, even after seeing “Mary Poppins” taking a break in the Utilidor. She’s applying to an internship at the park, and hopes to work there upon graduation. At Fordham, she’s involved in programming for senior week, so she said she appreciates all the work that goes on behind the scenes of a large production.

“It makes it a little bit more magical, because the logical part of me knows everything that goes into making this happen, and yet they’re still able to make it happen, and to deliver it with the consistency and scale that they do,” she said.

A 2012 graduate of Fordham’s Gabelli School, she first studied psychology as an undergraduate at Boston College.

“I didn’t have an undergraduate business degree and really used my time here building on my acumen to my make myself a better employee at my prior organization,” Greenwood told Gabelli School students who gathered in the McNally Amphitheater for her Sept. 19 talk on integrated marketing for the Olympics.

The talk was part of the marketing and consumer insights concentrations’ Speaker Series, which brings key industry talent to Fordham to inspire students with possible career tracks.

As the director of Olympics sales marketing at NBC Universal, Greenwood is responsible for ensuring that high-profile U.S. Olympic sponsors like Procter & Gamble, Visa, and Nike are incorporated into ads that run during the historic games.

She cited P&G’s “Thank You, Mom” global campaign featuring athletes like two-time Olympic decathlon gold medalist Ashton Eaton, and Simone Biles, the first female gymnast to win three straight titles, as an example of successful integrated marketing.

Those TV ads, which went viral during the 2016 Rio de Janiero Games, told “authentic” stories about the athletes while accentuating the brand’s corporate message, Greenwood said.  The emotional videos were also shown on platforms like NBC’s Today show.

“It’s a window where some moms that buy P&G brands are paying attention,” said Greenwood. “So even if a viewer is not huge sports fan, they may be tuning into the Today show and they’re getting Olympic content. We utilize that access point.”

“A Moment of Acceptance,” another global Olympic Games campaign that NBC spearheaded, featured refugee athletes that were associated with its sponsor, Visa.

“Diversity is something that every network and every media company is working through each day,” said Greenwood. “But Visa was a brand that actually came to us and said they wanted their campaign to be about acceptance.”

During the Rio Games, NBC, which has the rights to broadcast the Olympics on television and online until 2032, secured $1.2 billion in national ad sales, according to Advertising Age.

“My job was maybe a little easier 20 years ago when [the Olympics]was only on TV,” said Greenwood, who said that nowadays Olympics programming is also broadcast on NBC Universal networks such as Bravo, MSNBC, USA, and NBCOlympics.com. “Now we’re integrating our brands everywhere.”

Greenwood said that media consumption habits continue to evolve, as people watch Twitter, Facebook, and Snapchat content on their computers, smartphones, and TVs at home, at work, and during their commute.

To stay ahead of the trends, NBC is constantly trying to make the Olympics more accessible to foster new generations of Olympics viewers—though fewer people consume content digitally than on television, she said.

“It’s just a reminder that television is still an unbelievable platform for any live event, especially the Olympic Games,” said Greenwood. “People still want to go home and watch [it]with their families.”

As NBC prepares for the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea, Greenwood believes the industry will continue to expand with the emergence of new technology and social networks—keeping in mind the main sales objective during the games remains increasing “ad views.”

She said her team has been exploring live look-in opportunities, which could alert smartphone users when their favorite athlete is competing and provide short streams of the games to digital viewers.

Since media consumption could change in the future, nothing is set in stone.

“There could be a platform that doesn’t exist right now that changes the way we do business.”

New research from the Gabelli School of Business suggests that a deeper understanding of the role that financial exclusion plays in health care can help health care providers to better market programs that serve disadvantaged populations.

“Health care is a service that requires financial planning,” said Genevieve O’Connor, assistant professor of marketing at the Gabelli School. “Those who are financially excluded don’t have the resources to access services that meet their needs, which creates a barrier to care.”

Using data from a major metropolitan hospital in New Jersey, O’Connor studied how insurance and income enable use of health care services, and how this varies among millennials, Generation X, baby boomers, and the Silent Generation. She also measured utilization across gender and ethnic lines.

Her research, which was published in the Journal of Financial Services Marketing earlier this spring, showed that various groups and populations used insurance differently. While insured customers of all generations used less services, she learned that Asians, and other ethnicities of the Silent Generation used fewer services than whites—both insured and uninsured—of the same generation.

Conversely, while these non-white groups in the Silent Generation used fewer services, African-Americans in Generation X, for example, used health care much more—even as Generation X whites were using health care services less. A similar pattern was observed among Asian-Americans.

O’Connor’s findings suggested that cultural and generational life experiences may shape a person’s behavior or attitude toward health care.

Since studies have shown that immigrant populations such as Hispanics, and younger generations such as millennials, harbor a distrust of banks and banking, O’Connor wondered if the same thing was happening with health care, and if financial exclusion was a key factor.

“We typically think of financial exclusion as a lack of financial services,” she said. She explained that individuals who are “unbanked” are typically women, the poor, ethnic minorities, elderly, single parents, the unemployed, students, and people living in rural communities. “But those who lack access to financial services are the same people who lack access to health care.”

O’Connor said financial literacy impacts decision-making, including understanding how the use of health care services affects well-being. Also, complex health care terminologies such as premium, deductible, HMO and PPO, can be challenging to comprehend— even for educated consumers.

“Just because insurance is offered, that doesn’t necessarily mean most people will use it,” said O’Connor. “This is where marketing comes into play.”

In situations where the mere fact of having health insurance doesn’t lead individuals to use health care services, O’Connor said personalization of the marketing message is instrumental.

“It’s about getting into the mindset of those consumers,” she said. “Maybe there’s a shared experience that they have that we can tap into, even from an environmental perspective, to see how they might be more amenable to using those services.”

“To my grandfather, it has always been family first,” says Gabriella Macari, GABELLI ’09, “and it still is.”

A certified sommelier, Macari spent her childhood riding horses and tractors on the farm after her parents left Queens for Mattituck to plant vines and breathe life back into the 500 fallow acres perched above the Long Island Sound.

Thanks to the family’s dedication and an ecological and holistic approach to growing grapes, Macari Vineyards is thriving today.

“My father created a composting program and we have our own herd of longhorn cattle,” Macari explains, adding that the farm is also home to horses, ducks, pigs, chickens, and one peacock. This biodiversity ensures rich soil in which healthy fruit has grown abundantly and yielded bountiful harvests every year since the mid-1990s—with only one exception: In 2009, the results fell short of the family’s expectations.

That August, the family received a visit from Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham.

“Father McShane came out and blessed our vineyards,” Macari recalls, “and wouldn’t you know, the following year we had the most spectacular harvest ever.”

To carry out his father’s vision of establishing a successful family winery, Joseph Macari Jr. (Gabriella’s dad) studied biodynamic viticulture with the late Alan York from California and Alvaro Espinoza of Chile. Now, he and his wife, Alexandra, along with Gabriella and her younger brothers—Joseph, Thomas, and Edward—operate the business together full time.

Gabriella heads up the vineyard’s marketing and distribution efforts, promotes the Macari brand, assists in the cellar, and hosts tours and tastings for corporate groups.

Recognizing that her industry is vast and ever changing, she continues to expand her education. In September, she was accepted into the Institute of Masters of Wine study program, a highly selective and rigorous program that accepted only 88 candidates this year and inducted just 13 new Masters of Wine. The “MW” distinction, held by 354 professionals across 28 countries, recognizes individuals with the highest knowledge and ability in the art, science, and business of wine, equipping them to excel in all disciplines, from winemaking to viticulture to retailing.

Macari completed the Wine Executive Program at the UC Davis Graduate School of Management in 2013 and earned a Level 4 Diploma in Wine and Spirits—a prestigious recognition from the Wine & Spirit Education Trust. She also interned abroad in the Champagne and Bordeaux regions of France, where she learned about production and expanded her international network. As an independent consultant, she has lent her expertise to well-known vintners, such as Ribera del Duero, Wines from Spain, and Moët Hennessy.

Broadening Macari Vineyards’ distribution nationwide and sharing her knowledge and love of wine with others are among Macari’s goals.

“I want to help make learning about wine more approachable and less intimidating,” Macari says. She is also pleased that consumers are embracing wines made locally and domestically.

“As long as the quality remains high and producers keep pushing forward, local and domestic wines will be finding more homes on retail shelves and wine lists,” she says.

This trend is noteworthy in a market that for years been dominated by imports. And it’s especially promising for the future of a Long Island vineyard that began with one man’s vision and a family tradition now in its third generation.

—Claire Curry

Two of this year’s graduates—Andrew Santis, who is receiving a bachelor’s of science in marketing with a concentration in global business, and Stephanie Ballantyne, who graduates with a dual master’s degree in public accounting and taxation—have worked, lived, and studied in more than a dozen countries between the two of them.

To Ballantyne, the global bent at the Gabelli School felt like home. Born in Germany and raised in Switzerland, she completed her undergraduate degree in accounting finance at the University of Stirling in Scotland, and then worked for Deloitte Zurich before coming to Fordham.

The move was challenging, she said; but then, having attended an international high school and traveled as a student to the likes of Egypt, Russia, and Greece, the challenge was a familiar one.

“I’ve always had culture shock happening at some point or another, but I grew up knowing I’d have an international lifestyle,” said Ballantyne, whose credits include president of the Gabelli School’s Accounting and Tax Society and chief operating officer of the Finance Society.

“I like New York,” she said. “Switzerland is a bit more laid back—they start work earlier, but also leave earlier, and on the weekends their phones are turned off. For someone starting their career, it can seem a bit slow.”

The New York pace has suited Ballantyne. She interned at Deloitte in Manhattan last summer, and by August she had secured a full-time offer.

“It was a big change, coming here—especially because I started at Fordham in 2014 during the polar vortex. There were about two snow days per week, which made it hard to meet people,” she said. “But overall, Fordham was definitely the right choice.”

For Santis, a native New Yorker, it was a study tour to Spain during his junior year that sparked his passion for global business—but his real adventure began when he returned home to his internship at Cardwell Beach, a digital marketing agency.

“My boss knew how much I enjoyed Madrid, and in March he called and said they wanted to offer me compensation for my work, which would be to send me abroad to work for the summer,” he said. “It didn’t even have to be Spain—I could choose any country I wanted.”

His options boundless, Santis chose a multi-city tour of Europe. He began with a week in Paris, and then joined up with fellow Gabelli School students for a summer semester program at Fordham’s London Centre. After London, he continued on to Germany, where he spent a week each in Frankfurt, Cologne, Hamburg, Berlin, and Munich.

In the mornings Santis explored the city, and in the afternoons, once his New York colleagues were at the office, he worked on creating buyer personas for Cardwell Beach.

“It was definitely a test of strength and character,” Santis said. “I learned a lot about myself by venturing out to another part of the world on my own.”

Both Santis and Ballantyne have jobs lined up following graduation. Ballantyne will continue with Deloitte in Manhattan, and Santis will take a full-time position at Cardwell Beach (a position for which he will craft his own title and job description).

“Fordham prepared me well,” Ballantyne said. “All the opportunities are here—you just have to take the initiative to go get them.”

On April 1, the fifth annual Conference for Positive Marketing drew scholars and practitioners to the Lincoln Center campus to strategize on how to tap into consumer motivation for the sake of empowering and energizing these markets to create the greatest good for the world.

“Marketing strategies look at how we can influence consumers to take a certain action or change their behavior in some way,” said conference presenter Eve Rapp, PhD, an associate professor of business at Salem College.

“This conference is a forum to talk about how we can use our roles as marketers to look at societal problems and to make a positive difference.”

Rapp and her colleagues—Jaya Rapp, senior analyst of market research at Amway Corporation, and Ben Applebaum, executive creative director at Colangelo marketing agency—offered an interactive example of positive marketing through their presentation, “Using A Human-Centered Design Process to Tackle the Societal Problem of Food Waste.”

What is a human-centered design?

EVE RAPP: Human-centered design is similar to qualitative research [as opposed to quantitative research]insofar as it’s about gathering insights from the consumers themselves. It comes down to sitting with consumers, talking with them, and finding out how and why they act they way they do, or shop the way they do. For instance, [in the case of food waste,]what do you know about the issue? What would it take for you do change the way you purchase or store food?

How do marketers create behavior change in consumers around wasting food?

ER: The EPA and the USDA have called for the food industry to cut waste by 50 percent by 2030. To do this, we need to work with food manufacturers, growers, grocery stores, and other stakeholders. But all of these stakeholders are driven by consumer behavior. So, any real change has to also involve the consumer. Our session explores what we can do to make people aware of the problem of food waste, figure out what motivates their shopping choices, and then use that incentivize them to change their behavior.

Can you give an example?

ER: One of the most successful strategies in terms of battling food waste was by the French supermarket Intermarché, which ran a campaign called “Inglorious Fruits and Vegetables” to help sell the disfigured fruits and vegetables that usually get thrown away. They put a humorous spin on “ugly” fruits by talking about the “disfigured eggplant,” the “grotesque apple,” and the “failed lemon,” and in doing so let people know that these fruits and vegetables are just as good as ones that look prettier. In addition, they sold these “ugly” fruits and vegetables at a 30 percent discount. It turned out to be a very successful campaign.

How do you approach this issue?

ER: In the first part of our talk, we set the stage about food waste and why we need to care about it. Second, we’ll do a group activity to demonstrate the process of human-centered design. Finally, we talk about how to put these ideas into a marketing platform to create messages that will start changing behavior. So, [it is]a bit of an inventive approach to show the audience—as participants and as consumers—how this process would work for a larger societal problem like this.

The conference was sponsored by the Center for Positive Marketing at Fordham. Visit the conference website for more information.

Florio, a 2015 grad who majored in business administration with a dual concentration in entrepreneurship and marketing, was among handful of college seniors and recent grads from across the country to appear on a special episode of ABC program, which aired on Oct. 2.

The episode featured hit show, Shark Tank’s, “Mr. Wonderful,” Kevin O’Leary, putting college seniors through a sales boot camp on the art of the sell, prepping them for the show’s second annual sales challenge. After the field was narrowed down to three, the newly minted sales force headed to New York City’s Union Square Park to see which of the final contestants learned the most, in a competitive sales experiment captured on hidden camera.

The contestants had to sell cupcakes out of a truck from a company in which O’Leary had invested on Shark Tank, Wicked Good Cupcakes. O’Leary and ABC/ESPN anchor Hannah Storm provided live direction and commentary, and, in the end, Florio was the victor.

Christine Janssen-Selvadurai, the director of the entrepreneurship program at the Gabelli School, said she was “so proud of Tommy Florio’s representation of Fordham.” Watch the segment of 20/20 here.

Thanks to social media, an up-and-coming enterprise known as peer-to-peer (P2P) lending can skip the financial middleman and connect borrowers directly with lenders. The perks of P2P lending include lower interest rates for borrowers, higher returns for lenders, and increased access to loans for people who otherwise cannot get one.

“P2P lending is meant to mitigate financial exclusion by giving consumers access to funds that they might not otherwise have access to,” said Komarova, an assistant professor of marketing. “But we’re finding that despite these good intentions, some groups of people are actually excluded based on absolutely random factors.”

Study finds “some really quirky effects”

Komarova, whose research focuses on consumer behavior, teamed up with Gabelli colleague Laura Gonzalez, PhD, an assistant professor of finance, to find out how P2P investors make lending decisions.

Using a simulated P2P site (“Lendi”) that they created, Komarova and Gonzalez presented lenders with the profiles of potential borrowers. The profiles contained only as much information as real P2P sites include, which is typically a photo of the borrower, loan size and maturity, classification of loan purpose, borrower credit rating, and an explanation of why the money is needed.

The pair found that in the absence of the extensive background information that banks collect about potential borrowers, P2P lenders tended to rely on certain personal factors, such as age, to guide their decisions. For instance, lenders tended to give less money to younger borrowers than to older borrowers, simply based on perceived life experience.

However, when it came to middle-aged people, for whom life experience was not as clear-cut of a determinant, Komarova and Gonzalez found that lenders relied on “some really quirky effects.”

They found that female lenders were less likely to loan money to an attractive woman (a phenomenon termed the “beauty is beastly” effect) and male lenders were less likely to loan money to a financially or professionally successful man with an outstanding credit rating—even if these borrowers were equally or more qualified than their less attractive and successful counterparts, respectively.

But when the sexes were reversed—women loaning to men and men loaning to women—the attractiveness and status effects disappeared.

“It’s not just about attractiveness, though—there’s something more operating there,” said Komarova, who as a marketing scholar also has extensive training in psychology. “These decisions are subconscious, even evolutionarily-based.”

Innate competitiveness drives decisions

According to Komarova, these psychological quirks stem from the competitiveness written into our DNA. Men perceive successful men as a potential threat, as do women vis-à-vis other attractive women. Even though we may rationally know that this is not true, we nonetheless experience a subconscious slump in confidence when we encounter our primitive rivals.

Unfortunately for the potential borrower, the momentary slump in confidence that the lender feels gets misjudged as a bad “gut feeling” about the borrower’s application. This becomes even more relevant if the lender is wading through numerous applications, because he or she relies more on those initial “gut feelings” to speed up the decision process.

“In the absence of objective information [or in a time crunch], visceral reactions often guide our decisions—that is, that immediate sense of this ‘feels right’ or ‘feels wrong,’” she said. “However, these intuitions about this borrower can be based on completely random factors.”

Komarova and Gonzalez published papers on their findings in two prominent journals, the International Journal of Bank Marketing and the Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Finance. The next leg of the research will examine whether organizations that use P2P platforms demonstrate similar quirks when screening potential borrowers as compared to individual lenders.

“We’re hoping this research can educate P2P platform users not only to protect companies, investors, and borrowers, but also to help shape public policy and support these platforms so that everyone’s rights and opportunities are maximized,” Komarova said.

In their new book, Aksoy and co-author Tim Keiningham, global chief strategy officer at Ipsos Loyalty, argue that many companies overlook an important gauge in customer satisfaction: the share of customers’ spending in the company. Grounded in new, rigorously-tested strategies coming out of Harvard Business and MIT Sloan School of Management, The Wallet Allocation Rule: Winning the Battle for Share (Wiley, 2015) represents an “unabashed challenge” to current customer experience management.

“We have been working on the topic of loyalty for over 15 years,” said Aksoy, a professor of marketing. “During this time we have come across lots of companies complaining about investments in making customers happier, but not necessarily paying off.”

With this conundrum as their starting point, Aksoy and Keiningham began to investigate why companies’ efforts to improve customer satisfaction or to get customers to recommend their company to others didn’t translate into market share growth. They found that most companies’ focus is far too narrow.

“The way companies go about determining what to focus on is wrong,” Aksoy said. “They focus on what makes customers happy with the company, but don’t necessarily understand—or measure—whether the same customer also shops with competitors and why. It’s really as simple as that. [The book] offers a way to determine this.”

The pair recommends in The Wallet Allocation Rule that companies shift their focus from what creates satisfied customers to why customers buy from them and their competitors. Understanding that “why” helps companies not only determine where they rank relative to their competitors in the mind of the consumer, but ultimately grow their market share.

Aksoy and Keiningham will be present for a book launch tonight at Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus. The book comes out Feb. 9.