Marketing professors from around the world came together Feb. 25 through Feb. 27 for a conference hosted by the Jindal School to share ideas on quantitative research related to emerging marketing trends.

The Jindal School presented the 15th Annual Frank M. Bass – UT Dallas Frontiers of Research in Marketing Science Conference virtually this year because of the global pandemic. The event honors the memory of the late Dr. Frank M. Bass, Eugene McDermott Chair in the Jindal School, who for a quarter of a century led the way in establishing marketing as a quantitative science.

Dr. Nanda S. Kumar, professor of marketing in the Jindal School, organized the conference. He said 125 faculty members from various universities and 70 doctoral students registered to attend.

“This was by far the largest conference we have hosted in the last 15 years,” he said.

Participants spanned the globe — including Australia, China, Germany, Hong Kong, Portugal, Singapore, South Korea, the United Kingdom and all time zones in the United States.

Dr. Ying Xie, coordinator of the Jindal School Marketing Area, said the purpose of this conference is to foster high-quality research in quantitative approaches to marketing and provide a forum for a stimulating exchange of ideas.

In his opening welcome message, Dr. Varghese Jacob, Lars Magnus Ericsson Chair and the Jindal School’s vice dean, paid homage to the conference’s namesake. “I hope Frank is pleased to see,” he said, “wherever he might be, that the tradition continues.”

The research culture Bass envisioned “is pretty much ingrained in the school,” Jacob said, “and has become vital — I mean I would say it is part of the DNA of the school.”

Dr. Pradeep Chintagunta, the Joseph T. and Bernice S. Lewis Distinguished Service Professor of Marketing at the Booth School of Business, University of Chicago, served as keynote speaker. His presentation, “Analytics for Good,” focused on the work he did in Rwanda providing business analytics tools to small-business owners who wanted to grow their businesses to determine what effect doing so would have on their bottom lines.

Tongil (TI) Kim, a JSOM assistant professor of marketing, was a conference discussant. He said he always says yes to these types of invitations because it is a great way to learn about others’ work.

“My main takeaway from this conference is that there is a lot of interesting, thought-provoking re- search happening all around the world despite the pandemic,” Kim said. “We had topics ranging from consumer data privacy, advertising, pricing, firm competition and large-scale field experiments to gender and inequality, retail, healthcare and public policy. Marketing plays a role in all these different aspects of our daily life, and it was great to hear top-notch research on such a variety of topics in a single conference. The last takeaway is we all miss in-person conferences, and hopefully we can have our in-person Bass Conference back next year.”