Analysis Group Consultants and Affiliates Contribute Scholarship to Volume on Marketing and the Law
October 20, 2023
A wealth of analytical, policy, and legal issues sit at the intersection of marketing and the law, raising interesting and relevant questions to audiences in both fields. How should consumer behavior inform regulatory policy? How should marketing research inform the law’s approach to phenomena such as false advertising or deceptive pricing? How do publicly available data such as consumer reviews on social media affect commercial disputes?
Analysis Group academic affiliates Jacob Gersen of Harvard Law School and Joel Steckel of the NYU Stern School of Business edited The Cambridge Handbook of Marketing and the Law to address these and other issues, and to map the interaction between the two domains. The book’s chapters explore how consumers form perceptions, preferences, and beliefs, and how the measurement of their behavior can affect outcomes in a variety of litigation settings.
Several Analysis Group consultants and affiliates contributed chapters to the publication.
- In “The Purchase Funnel and Litigation,” Vice President Laura O’Laughlin and academic affiliate Catherine Tucker of the MIT Sloan School of Management explain the purchase funnel, an analytical tool in marketing studies, and describe how it can aid triers of fact in commercial disputes to pinpoint the stage at which alleged offenses occur.
- In “Choice Experiments: Reducing Complexity and Measuring Behavior Rather than Perception,” Professor Steckel, Managing Principal Rebecca Kirk Fair, and Manager Anne Cai show how test control experiments can be useful in assessing materiality in false advertising and trademark protection cases.
- In “Use of Conjoint Analysis in Litigation: Challenges, Best Practices, and Common Mistakes,” Principal Rene Befurt and Associate Aylar Pour Mohammad explain how conjoint analysis, which measures the relative importance of a product’s features, can be relevant to consumer fraud, false advertising, and patent infringement cases.
- In “Marketing Analysis in Class Certification,” academic affiliate Randolph Bucklin and Vice President Peter Simon examine how marketing research tools can help shed light on questions of common impact that are critical to class action litigation.
- In “Taking a Second Look at Secondary Meaning: A Marketing Perspective on Circuit Court Factors,” academic affiliate Peter Golder, Vice President Michael Schreck, and Managing Principal Aaron Yeater provide a marketing perspective on the factors appeals courts have used to establish the distinctiveness of a trademark.
- In “The Coca-Cola Bottle: A Fragile Vessel for Building a Brand,” Professor Gersen and Professor Scott Hemphill of the NYU School of Law use one of the most famous examples of trade dress protection – the Coca-Cola bottle – to explore the relationship between patent protection, branding, and trademark.
- In “Eating Law,” Professor Gersen and Professor Stephen Ansolabehere of Harvard University analyze the results of a series of choice experiments involving consumer confusion about food and beverage product attributes.
The Cambridge Handbook of Marketing and the Law is available from Cambridge University Press.