Ph.D.
University of California, Berkeley - 2018

Professor of Marketing Makes Sense of Consumer Behaviors

Which designer purse will become the next “it” bag? Many have concluded that fashion hits such as Hermes’ famous Birkin bag are random and impossible to predict. New research by Dr. Dmitri Kuksov, professor of marketing in the Naveen Jindal School of Management, concludes that the randomness is no accident. Dmitri Kuksov and his co-author Kangkang Wang, who is currently a professor at the University of Alberta, challenge prevailing notions about how products rise to must-have status in their article, “A Model of the 'It' Products in Fashion.” The article appeared in the journal MarketingScience earlier this year. The article explores the “it” bag phenomenon, in which purses by Fendi, Prada, Dior and other designers have become the must-have bags in various years. The authors quote observations that fashion hits are the results of “dumb luck.”