ND marketing professor earns prestigious award for newspaper research

The newspaper business has been rocky for more than a decade, as steady drops in advertising and readership have led to bankruptcies, closures and rounds of layoffs.

But research by University of Notre Dame marketing professor Vamsi Kanuri suggests all is not lost when it comes to the newspaper business model. Working with a major West Coast newspaper, he created an algorithm for optimally designing a subscription plan so that the newspaper could maximize revenues from both readership and advertising. Kanuri’s research with the West Coast newspaper recently earned him the prestigious 2020 Robert J. Lavidge Global Marketing Research Award, given by the American Marketing Association (AMA) to recognize a marketing practitioner or educator who has devised and successfully implemented a research or insight procedure that has practical implications for use by others. The research led to the newspaper’s implementation of his algorithm, which improved its revenue substantially and attenuated subscriber and advertiser attrition. (Read more about Kanuri’s work in Mendoza Business magazine.) The assistant marketing professor joined Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business in 2018. His research interests include evaluating the performance and consumer welfare implications of marketing strategies within the domains of social media, multichannel and services marketing. His studies, which have appeared in leading marketing and management journals, have earned prestigious academic awards from the AMA, the Academy of Marketing Science, INFORMS and decision science organizations for their impact on marketing practice. Kanuri's research has been featured in several popular press outlets including the Financial Times, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune Magazine, Fox Business, Indiana Public Broadcast Radio and the Nieman Journalism Lab. He frequently consults with companies on a variety of marketing problems and builds models that aid in managerial decision-making. He currently teaches marketing decision models in Mendoza’s undergraduate program and marketing analytics in the Notre Dame MBA program. He received the James Dincolo outstanding undergraduate marketing professor award and Poets and Quants' 40 under 40 best MBA professor recognition for his teaching. He earned his master’s degree and Ph.D. from the University of Missouri.