Sandy Jap
Sarah Beth Brown Professor of Marketing | Emory University, Goizueta Business School
Atlanta, GA, UNITED STATES
Global expert on partnering relationships, B2B routes-to-market, omnichannel, franchise, and ecommerce management
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Biography
Sandy Jap is the Sarah Beth Brown Endowed Professor of Marketing at the Goizueta Business School at Emory University. Her research focuses on strategic partnering, business-to-business management, channels of distribution, and go-to-market strategies. She has published widely across the top academic journals in marketing and management science. She is among the top 2% of most cited scholars and scientists worldwide across 22 scientific fields and 176 subfields.
She has received numerous awards, including a Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Marketing Association (AMA) Interorganizational Special Interest Group, the Innovative Marketing Award from the Marketing Management Association, and many paper awards for her contributions and service to the academy. She is an AMA and Marketing Science Institute (MSI) fellow as well as at Institute for the Study of Business Markets (ISBM) at the Pennsylvania State University and the Direct Selling Education Foundation (DSEF). She is currently an MSI board member, and a former editor-in-chief at Marketing Letters.
She is the author of Partnering with the Frenemy, and co-author of A Field Guide to Channel Strategy; both are how-to books on going to market strategy. She is a former faculty member at the MIT Sloan School of Management and the Wharton School. Her PhD is from the University of Florida (Go Gators!).
Education (2)
University of Florida: PhD, Marketing
University of Florida: BSc, Marketing
Areas of Expertise (6)
B2B Routes to Market
Strategic Partnerships
Omnichannel Strategy
B2B and Channel Analytics
Social Media Selling
Direct Selling
Publications (4)
Guardians of Trust: How Review Platforms Can Fight Fakery and Build Consumer Trust
Journal of Marketing Research2024 As customers increasingly rely on online reviews for making consumption decisions, the dangers arising from misinformation and fakery have become an acute source of concern for consumers, firms, and society at large. Many online review platforms claim a role as guardians of trust in the information exchange process. Yet, little is known about the practices firms can utilize to design platforms that build and safeguard consumer trust. The authors draw on governance and identity disclosure literature streams to propose five practices that mitigate fakery and build trust in the platform: monitoring, exposure, community building, status endowment, and identity disclosure.
Winning the new channel war on Amazon and third-party platforms
ScienceDirect2022 The top online marketplaces in the world, such as Alibaba, Amazon, eBay and others, sold $2.7 trillion in 2020, or 62% of global web sales that year. Despite the promise of unfettered access to customers, the reality is that most sellers struggle with unprecedented unauthorized “rogue resellers.” These often anonymous, third party individuals and firms may not provide the quality experiences aligned with customers’ expectations of a brand and often market their goods in competition with trusted partners.
Can Encroachment Benefit Hotel Franchisees?
SAGE JournalsTI Tongil Kim, Sandy D. Jap
2021 Franchise encroachment is the addition of an outlet in the vicinity of existing franchisees. It is a highly contentious issue resulting in revenue cannibalization of incumbent locations. Against this backdrop, we consider the possibility that the addition of same brand outlets can in fact, create positive effects via customer utility and ultimately, benefit franchisees. This may be due to a range of mechanisms such as quality signaling, learning, or brand awareness, resulting in a positive pathway on franchisee performance.
Many (Un)happy Returns? The Changing Nature of Retail Product Returns and Future Research Directions
ScienceDirect2020 The sheer magnitude of product returns should give anyone interested in retailing pause: in 2018, out of $3,688 billion in total retail sales, $369 billion—roughly 10%!—were returned to retailers post-purchase (National Retail Federation 2018). Ofcourse, the headline number alone does not tell the whole story. Returns, which often vary by channel (higher for online than offline sales) and by season (higher during the winter holidays), also differ dramatically in terms of how “legitimate” the returns are, how difficult they are to process, how re-sellable the items are, and how positively or negatively the returns process affects customers’ attitudes toward the retailer. Each of these factors can have major implications for retailers’ short and long-term performance.
Research Spotlight
In the News (17)
FTC bans fake online product reviews
The Week online
2024-10-22
Reviews are "increasingly important in almost all of our purchase decisions," Sandy Jap, an Emory University marketing professor, told The Wall Street Journal, and fake reviews create a "noisier environment for consumers" and muddle trust. The FTC also now prohibits hiding or suppressing bad reviews, reviews written by undisclosed company insiders, and "buying fake indicators of social media influence," like bot-generated followers or views.
$5 for a Good Online Review? No Way, Says New FTC Rule
The Wall Street Journal online
2024-08-29
“The role of reviews is increasingly important in almost all of our purchase decisions,” said Sandy Jap, a marketing professor at Emory University’s Goizueta Business School. “Fake reviews are problematic because they are misleading. It’s just creating a noisier environment for consumers to figure out who and what they can trust.”
Expert Insight: Fake News, Fake Reviews: Building Trust with Online Shoppers | Emory University Goizueta Business School
Emory University's Goizueta Business School online
2023-10-31
Goizueta Business School’s Sandy Jap has some suggestions. Together with colleagues Ben Beck of Brigham Young University’s Marriott School of Business and Stefan Wuyts of Penn State’s Smeal College of Business, Jap, who is the Sarah Beth Brown Professor of Marketing, put together a series of studies to test the kinds of measures and mechanisms that platforms can deploy to win user confidence. And it turns out there’s one tactic that works more effectively than any other: actively monitoring the authenticity of user reviews. That and being open and transparent about doing so.
Partnering with the Frenemy
Goizueta Effect online
2022-07-28
Google and Samsung. Nike and Foot Locker. Mobileye and Tesla. Partnerships are critical in business, yet 50 to 60 percent fail. Goizueta Professor Sandy Jap joins to discuss frenemies in business, the common pitfalls of partnering, and how to preserve alliances in a competitive and dynamic environment.
Product Returns Represent Billion-Dollar Strategic Blind Spot for Major Retailers
emorybusiness.com
2021-02-11
Even before the pandemic hit, Sandy Jap, Sarah Beth Brown professor in marketing, Ryan Hamilton, associate professor of marketing, and former Goizueta Business School dean, Tom Robertson, were perplexed at how little academic research existed regarding returns. “Instead of viewing returns as a nuisance and an added cost, they are an opportunity to engage with customers and build brand loyalty,” explained Robertson, currently the Joshua J. Harris professor and professor of marketing at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, academic director, Jay H. Baker Retailing Center at Wharton, and the executive director of the Wharton-INSEAD Alliance. “Returns are part and parcel of the new retail landscape. This has been exacerbated by the strong uptick in online.”
The Business of Generosity: How Atlanta companies giving now could see a customer loyalty boost later
Atlanta Business Journal online
2020-04-07
Those acts of community service, could pay off after the pandemic.
Disney’s Streaming Push Turned Amazon Into Its Frenemy
Bloomberg online
2019-11-19
When Walt Disney Co. launched its new streaming service last week, it had a key partner: Amazon.com Inc. Many consumers connected to Disney+ through the tech giant’s Fire TV digital media players. And Amazon Web Services helped deliver Disney’s movies and TV shows to viewers through its cloud-computing network. But Amazon is also Disney’s streaming competitor -- one of many so-called frenemies in the burgeoning market for online TV.
WAP Woman Wednesday
Women in the Academy and Professions online
2019-05-22
In this regular feature, we hear from women academics and professionals about their lives, their faith, and the way it all intersects. Pull up a chair and join us as we chat with marketing professor Sandy Jap.
The role of behavior in managing mergers
Emory Business print
2017-11-01
Despite corporate interest in M&As as a growth strategy, research indicates that financial returns on such deals often fall short of expectations.
Behind Frenemy Lines
Womenetics online
2016-02-15
Navigating Business Relationships and the Challenges of “Frenemization”
Marketing expert, author Sandy Jap to speak at Bedding Conference
Furniture Today online
2016-01-20
Marketing professor and author Sandy Jap will be one of the featured speakers at Furniture/Today’s upcoming Bedding Conference, set for May 10-12. Jap, a professor of marketing at the Goizueta Business School at Emory University, will look at changing buying trends in the overall retail marketplace and in mattress industry, which includes the rise of online retailers. Her address is titled, “It’s not what consumers want to buy, it’s about how they buy.”...
New semester brings new resources, programs and events across Emory
Emory News Center online
2016-01-12
New book: Sandy Jap, professor of marketing, is the author of "Partnering with the Frenemy: A Framework for Managing Business Relationships, Minimizing Conflict, and Achieving Partnership Success" (Pearson FT Press, Dec. 21, 2015). Jap's research focuses on helping to anticipate, prevent and solve the problems that lead close professional relationships to implode — applicable to businesses, nonprofits, government agencies, and any other group whose success depends on ongoing external partnerships...
Dealing with Frenemies
Atlanta Business Chronicle online
2016-01-01
Most people go into business with the idea of being friends, but if strains occur that test their relationship, it’s not hard for those one-time “friends” in business to become “frenemies.”
How to pick the perfect business partner
CNN online
While it might seem logical to launch a new venture with someone you get along with, that closeness can actually be a drawback, says Sandy Jap, a professor of marketing at Emory University and author of Partnering with the Frenemy.
The 'squishy' side of B2B
Emory 404 Newsletter online
2016-03-01
Business relationships fail more often than they succeed. Enter Sandy Jap, an expert in interorganizational relationships, whose research spans industries and organizations in both profit and nonprofit spaces.
Four Area Malls To Open Thanksgiving Day
90.1 WABE online
2013-11-27
Sandy Jap, a professor of marketing at Emory’s Goizueta Business School, said trend analysis from the last few years showed an increasing number of people were shopping online post-Thanksgiving feast. “These brick and mortar retailers are trying to match what’s happening online,” Jap said...
Macy’s the latest retailer to say it will open Thanksgiving night
The Washington Times online
2013-10-28
“Part of this is growing demand on the part of customers, but a greater factor is likely the competition from online stores,” said Sandy Jap, a marketing professor at Emory University’s Goizueta Business School. “The past few years we have seen a growing number of holiday sales move online, as customers increasingly demand to be able to shop on their terms. When major retailers choose to open earlier, it puts pressure on other bricks-and-mortar retailers to follow suit.”...
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