"Publish or perish” — it’s a maxim that we academics live by. But how does a paper become a publication? How do researchers take a rough idea and craft it into a draft? And how do they navigate the publication process, with all the bumps and bruises along the way? In each episode of “How I Wrote This,” marketing professors Brett Gordon and Karen Winterich speak to the authors of an academic marketing paper to get the backstory of how that paper came to be.
Ep. 33 - Transformer Models for Customer Journeys, with Zipei Lu and P.K. Kannan
Can the architecture behind large language models predict where a customer journey is headed? Zipei Lu (Baruch College) and P.K. Kannan (University of Maryland) treat a hospitality firm’s customer touchpoints like words in a sentence. They build a transformer whose attention patterns vary from customer to customer.
They talk with co-host Brett Gordon about how the paper moved across journals before landing at JMR and what they learned from industry feedback.
Lu, Zipei, and P.K. Kannan (2026), “AI for Customer Journeys: A Transformer Approach,” Journal of Marketing Research, 63(1), 1-26.
JMR: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00222437251347268 (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00222437251347268)
SSRN: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4684617 (https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4684617)
8 Sept 2026
Ep. 32 – Untangling Colorism with Tanuka Ghoshal and Tripat Gill
Eight years. Seven rounds of revision. And a first submission where every reviewer recommended reject. In this episode, JMR Co-Editor Karen Winterich talks with Tanuka Ghoshal (https://zicklin.baruch.cuny.edu/faculty-profile/tanuka-ghoshal/) (Baruch College) and Tripat Gill (https://www.wlu.ca/academics/faculties/lazaridis-school-of-business-and-economics/faculty-profiles/tripat-gill/index.html) (Wilfrid Laurier University) about their paper, "The 'Dark Is Hardworking' Association: How Skin Tone Affects Perceptions of Service Providers in India (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00222437251409096)." Colorism in India has long been documented as a fair-skin premium, but this research uncovers the opposite: darker skin-toned professionals are perceived as more hardworking, and therefore more competent, in domains like financial and technical services. In the episode, you'll hear how an editorial team's nudge toward human branding sent the project in an entirely new direction, why the attractiveness angle wasn’t retained as a focus, and the real costs of collecting quality data in India.
10 Aug 2026
Ep. 31 - From Rejection to Recognition: The Story Behind Two JMR Award-Winning Papers
If you've submitted a paper, odds are that you’ve experienced rejection. Does that mean the idea is dead? Not necessarily. Sometimes it just needs the right angle, and the right review team, to become something bigger than you first imagined. Recorded during Summer AMA, this episode brings together the 2026 JMR award winners for a joint conversation with Karen Winterich and Brett Gordon. First, Shiri Melumad (https://marketing.wharton.upenn.edu/profile/melumad/) and Robert J. Meyer (https://marketing.wharton.upenn.edu/profile/meyerr/) discuss their Paul E. Green/Vithala R. Rao Award–winning paper, "How Listening Versus Reading Alters Consumers' Interpretations of News (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00222437241280068)", built without an existing playbook to follow. Then Stephan Seiler (https://www.imperial.ac.uk/business-school/authors/sseiler) and Anna Tuchman (https://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/academics-research/faculty/tuchman_anna) join to talk about their Weitz-Winer-O'Dell Award–winning paper, "The Impact of Soda Taxes: Pass-Through, Tax Avoidance, and Nutritional Effects (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0022243720969401)," co-authored with Song Yao (https://olin.washu.edu/faculty/song-yao), and why an interdisciplinary, policy-relevant paper found staying power across marketing, economics, and public health. Both teams reflect together on how a review process can develop a paper, the risks of racing the clock on a fast-moving topic, and what it takes to get research seen once it's published.
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