Research

Summary

I am a methodologist that helps managers use data to understand how consumers navigate difficult decisions. I've studied questions such as:

  • How do indebted consumers allocate limited funds to repayments of multiple credit cards?
  • What types of products do consumers eliminate when their budgets contract?
  • How do consumers tradeoff personal space and ideal locations when picking seats in crowded environments?
  • How does the emergence of a prefered option influence the evaluation of new (and potentially) contradictory information?

As I often find that existing methods provide misleading answer to my questions, I have to create new methods and tools to answer them better. Sometimes, that involves the development of a new measure that can be used in pre-existing data. Other times, I create novel paradigms or statistical analysis models.

More recently, as an empirical area, I have focused on helping financially vulnerable consumers make purchase, debt and repayment decisions. Many of my ongoing projects involve company collaborations on issues related to unusual spending notifications, tax refunds, the purchase of life insurance, prize-linked savings and predecisional biases in options trading.

Articles by topic

Here's a sortable list of my published academic articles. "Top 4" is for (JM, JMR, JCR, MKS). "Marketing" excludes non-marketing journals. "Methodological" refers to articles where the goal was to contribute a new tool. "Empirical" refers to articles where the goal was to inform theory. Don't hesitate to reach out if you want a copy.

Sawant, Rajeev, Mahima Hada and Simon J. Blanchard (2020), ”Contractual Discrimination in Franchise Relationships,” Journal of Retailing, forthcoming.
Moins, Theo, Daniel Aloise and Simon J. Blanchard (2020), ”RecSeats: A Hybrid Convolutional Network Choice Model for Large Scale Seat Recommendations at Reserved Seating Venues,” in RecSys ’20: Proceedings of the 20th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems, September 2020.
Blanchard, Simon J., Tatiana Dyachenko, Keri L. Kettle (2020). ”Locational Choices: Modeling Consumer Preferences for Proximity to Others at Reserved-Seating Venues,” Journal of Marketing Research, 57(4).
Pinerho, Daniel, Daniel Aloise, Simon J. Blanchard (2020). ”Convex Fuzzy k-Medoid Clustering.” Fuzzy Sets and Systems, 389 (June), 66-92.
Blanchard, Simon J., Mahima Hada and Kurt A. Carlson (2018). ”Specialist Competitor Referrals: How Salespeople Can Use Competitor Referrals for Nonfocal Products to Increase Focal Product Sales.” Journal of Marketing, 82 (4), 127-145.
Blanchard, Simon J., Daniel Aloise, Wayne S. DeSarbo (2017). ”Extracting Summary Piles from Sorting Task Data” Journal of Marketing Research, 54 (3), 398-414.
Garvey, Aaron G., Simon J. Blanchard, Karen P. Winterich (2017). ”Turning Unplanned Overpayments into Status Signals: Benefits of Mentioning the Price Paid.” Marketing Letters, 28(1), 71-83.
Kettle, Keri L., Remi Trudel, Simon J. Blanchard, Gerald Haubl (2016). ”Repayment Concentration and Consumer Motivation to Get Out of Debt.” Journal of Consumer Research, 43 (3), 460-477.
Blanchard, Simon J., Kurt A. Carlson and Jamie D. Hyodo (2016). ”The Favor Request Effect: Requesting a Favor from Consumers to Seal the Deal.” Journal of Consumer Research, 42 (6), 985-1001.
Blanchard, Simon J., Ishani Banerji. (2016) ”Evidence-Based Recommendations for Designing FreeSorting Experiments.” Behavior Research Methods, 48 (4), 1318-1336.
Santi, Everton, Daniel Aloise and Simon J. Blanchard (2016). ”A Model for Clustering Using Heterogeneous Dissimilarity Matrices.” European Journal of Operations Research, 253 (3), 659-672
Carlson, Kurt A., Jared Wolfe, Simon J. Blanchard, Joel C. Huber and Dan Ariely (2015). ”The Budget Contraction Effect: How Contracting Budgets Lead to Less Varied Choice.” Journal of Marketing Research, 52 (3), 337-348.
Blanchard, Simon J., Kurt A. Carlson, and Margaret G. Meloy (2014). ”Biased Predecisional Processing of Leading and Non-Leading Alternatives.” Psychological Science, 25 (3), 812-816.
Kim, Sunghoon, Simon J. Blanchard, Wayne S. DeSarbo, and Duncan H.K. Fong (2013). ”Implementing Managerial Constraints in Model Based Segmentation: Extensions of Kim, Fong, and DeSarbo (2012) with an Application to Heterogeneous Perceptions of Service Quality.” Journal of Marketing Research, 50 (5), 664-673.
Hamilton, Rebecca, W., Debora V. Thompson, Zachary G. Arens, Simon J. Blanchard, Gerald Haubl, P.K. Kannan, Donald R. Lehmann, Margaret G. Meloy, Neal Roese, Manoj Thomas (2014). ”Consumer Substitution Decisions: An Integrative Framework.” Marketing Letters, 25 (3), 305-317.
Blanchard, Simon J., Wayne S. DeSarbo (2013). ”A New Zero-Inflated Negative Binomial Methodology for Latent Category Identification.” Psychometrika, 78 (2), 322-340.
Blanchard, Simon J., Daniel Aloise and Wayne S. DeSarbo (2012). ”Heterogeneous P-Median for Categorization Based Clustering.” Psychometrika, 77 (4), 741-762.
Blanchard, Simon J., Wayne S. DeSarbo, A. Selin Atalay, Nukhet Harmancioglu (2011). ”Identifying Consumer Heterogeneity in Unobserved Categories.” Marketing Letters, 23 (1), 177-194.
DeSarbo, Wayne S., A. Selin Atalay, and Simon J. Blanchard (2009). ”A Three-Way Clusterwise Multidimensional Unfolding Procedure for the Spatial Representation of Context Dependent Preferences.” Computational Statistics and Data Analysis, 53 (8), 3217-3230.
DeSarbo, Wayne S., A. Selin Atalay, David LeBaron, and Simon J. Blanchard (2008). ”Estimating Multiple Segment-Level Ideal Points from Context Dependent Survey Data.” Journal of Consumer Research, 35 (June), 142-153.

Academic CV

List of my appointments, publications, honors and service.

Service to the field

  • Associate Editor at the Journal of Consumer Research and the International Journal of Research in Marketing
  • Member of the editorial review board at the Journal of Marketing, and the Journal of Marketing Research.
  • Member of the AMA Academic Council (2018-2021)
  • Co-chair of the AMA Summer Conference (2020)
  • Co-chair of the 11th Triennial Invitational Choice Symposium (2019), for which we edited a special Issue at Marketing Letters