Each week, Daniels is featuring a researcher who conducts meaningful research that impacts their field and the wider community. Learn more about their work in Q&As with the Daniels Research team and email them to nominate yourself or a colleague for a future Q&A. 
Saeed Janani is an assistant professor of marketing who joined the Daniels College of Business in 2023. He is an expert in quantitative marketing strategy and marketing research. His academic research focuses on the marketing/technology interface, specifically issues relating to the impact of firms’ capabilities and technological orientation on firm performance. In addition, he studies the roles of marketing in enhancing societal welfare, beyond just what is good for the financial performance of firms, and he seeks to answer how marketing phenomena might improve people’s lives and strengthen societies.
Saeed has won several research and teaching awards, and his scholarly work has been published in several top-tier marketing journals, including Marketing Science, the Academy of Marketing Science, the Journal of International Marketing, and the Journal of Business Research.
He received his PhD in marketing from Arizona State University’s W.P. Carey School of Business in 2020, and his master’s in marketing research from Southern Illinois University in 2014. Prior to that, he worked for several years as a product and brand manager.
What is your area of research?
I study firms’ marketing strategy phenomena using quantitative methods to look at positive outcomes from marketing action. So not necessarily financial outcomes, but societal or consumer welfare. I have two broad streams of research: first, delving into how firms can develop capabilities like new product design, and how that can translate into financial performance. Secondly, I study marketing phenomena and how those phenomena impact consumers, society and our environment.
What kinds of studies are you conducting right now?
For my first stream of research I’m currently studying exterior product design and what the quality of design means in terms of a firm’s capability. Companies like Apple or BMW, for example, are continuously coming up with new products that are visually superior to other products on the market. Other companies can’t keep up with this output of good design. This suggests that this characteristic is a capability, which means something that another company cannot simply buy or copy. So I look at this visual product design capability and see that it actually generates profit and growth.
In my second stream of research, I’m looking at institutional common ownership. This is the idea that one shareholder can own considerable amounts of stock in multiple companies within the same industry. A shareholder owning significant portions of American, United and Southwest Airlines, for example. Our research is showing that this common ownership leads to higher prices and lower quality for consumers. Tying this into marketing, sometimes these companies may be pressured to put significant shareholders on their boards, where they can now influence the companies and their marketing strategies.
How do you bring your research into the classroom?
The promise of marketing is to be responsible to all groups of stakeholders, including employees, consumers and society at large, so I like to talk about the effect of social responsibility and ethics in the classroom, which is very much linked to my second stream of research. In one study, we looked at 3,500 CEOs and found that 20% of them had a marketing background. We then found that this group of CEOs had stronger social responsibility performance compared to CEOs with backgrounds in finance, operations, general management and so on. This evidence that the study of marketing has positive social outcomes can be exciting for students.
How do you interact with stakeholders?
In my product design research we worked directly with product managers and designers at large companies to conduct qualitative interviews to get their input on how we are measuring design capability. We asked them to validate our various measures to ensure that our performance scales made sense. On the other hand, in my common ownership research, we haven’t interacted with managers directly, but we do address managers’ concerns that we have come across indirectly. A similar paper to ours came out in a finance journal in 2018, and one of the shareholders referenced publicly criticized the paper a lot. So, in our paper, we had to address that criticism. We showed that even after addressing all of the points made by the shareholder, the effect of common ownership on high prices and low-quality holds.
How do you see your work impacting society?
A big group of my target audience for that common ownership research is policymakers, who do look to academic work for robust empirical findings. They actively seek to understand what’s going on in academic research. If there is a direct implication for policymaking, they’re going to embrace it.
More broadly, I do think that there is a gap between academic findings and firms’ strategies, but engaging with the media and sharing insights through different channels can be an effective way to communicate our work and influence decision-making.