Professor Prasad Naik was one of the top-five finalists for the prestigious 2008 William F. O’Dell Award, for his pioneering research on the role of synergy in integrating marketing communications. The American Marketing Association awards the honor for articles published in the Journal of Marketing Research over the last five years. The articles are judged by the Editorial Board as the “most significant, long-term contribution to marketing theory, methodology, and/or practice.”

Naik and his co-author, Professor Kalyan Raman from the Northwestern University, were nominated for their article, “Understanding the Impact of Synergy in Multimedia Communication.” In their research, Naik and Raman developed a new method that enables marketing managers to quantify the magnitude of synergy using readily available market data. The authors also established new marketing principles: first, in the presence of synergy, managers should increase the total marketing budget and allocate a larger portion of the incremental budget to the less effective marketing activity; second, because synergies induce catalytic effects, managers should spend even on ineffective marketing activities that exhibit synergies with other effective activities.

Naik has presented these novel findings to senior managers from major multinational companies at the Marketing Science Institute’s Metrics Conference in Boston, Mass., and at the New Media Landscape Conference in Barcelona, Spain.