"We Are GSM" - Meet Associate Professor Ashwin Aravindakshan
How can brands maximize engagement across Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.? Associate Professor Aravindakshan has crunched the data in his marketing research on optimizing ad budgets and creative resources. Aravindakshan is faculty director for the Master of Science in Business Analytics program and a big soccer fan, too.
My Research and Teaching
I joined the Graduate School of Management in 2007, and what attracted me here was the caliber of research productive faculty at the school, the opportunity to work with such high-quality faculty, and the amazing research projects that I've had the privilege to work on over the past 15 years.
The decision I made to join the Graduate School of Management was one of the best ones in my career.
My research mainly involves the study of advertising models and how consumers respond to advertising models.
I recently collaborated on a paper with (Adjunct Assistant) Professor Vasu Unnava, my colleague at the GSM, where we explored how firms’ posts across multiple social media generate consumer engagement.
As users, the messages across these different platforms co-mingle in our mind, and so we might see something on Twitter or engage with the firm on Facebook.
And so that quantification allows managers to better optimize their allocation across these social media platforms.
Companies benefit because they understand how to attribute success or failure to their marketing actions and then can reallocate or optimize their marketing allocations over time.
Over the years of the Graduate School of Management, I have had the opportunity to teach multiple courses from a course that I designed myself called Customer Relationship Management, which essentially explores how consumers respond to incentives to Marketing Management, to New Product Development, and my latest course that I teach, which is Information, Insights and Impact.
And all of these courses incorporate an element of research that we do at the school.
Master of Science in Business Analytics Program
The Graduate School of Management launched the Master of Science in Business Analytics program in 2017.
The goal of the program is to educate individuals who are interested in either learning more about how to use data to make decisions or transitioning into a career in data science and business.
The MSBA program includes a year-long practicum project where teams of students collaborate with firms on trying to work through data problems that they have.
So this could be from collecting data to analyzing it, all the way to understanding how to build dashboards that can tell stories to executives.
For this reason, the program is located in downtown San Francisco so that students have easy access to the firms that they eventually might end up working with, or firms that they collaborate with on the practicum project.
Soccer is My Game
I really enjoy soccer. I used to play a lot. I'm a big soccer fan.
I also coach my son's soccer team, which I really enjoy. It has taught me a lot about how to deal with different personalities on the field, about how to make seven-year-olds run and, you know, go the right direction with the ball.