主题: How Important Are Marketing Employees? Marketing Employee Turnover and Brand Performance

题目：营销员工有多重要？营销员工离职与品牌绩效

时间: 2026年1月7日上午8:30--9:30

地点:  管理科研楼第一教室

主讲人: Ruizhi Zhu, Postdoctoral Research Associate, D’Amore-McKim School of Business, Northeastern University

Bio:

Dr. Ruizhi Zhu is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Marketing in the D’Amore-McKim School of Business at Northeastern University. He obtained his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Toronto in 2023. His research interests lie broadly in platform economy, privacy, advertising and branding strategies. His research methodology combines analytical modeling, causal inference and machine learning. His papers have been published in Marketing Science. His works have been presented in international marketing and economic conferences such as UT Dallas Frontiers of Research in Marketing Science (UTD FORMS) Conference, Marketing Science Conference, POMS Conference and Asia Meeting of the Econometric Society.

照片：

Abstract: 

We test the impact of marketing employees on brand performance metrics by inspecting how marketing employee turnover—stratified by seniority, role and type—affects brand buzz and brand equity. Using a novel dataset that combines detailed employment records with brand metrics for 477 firms from 2012 to 2020, we find strong evidence that marketing employee turnover leads to significant declines in both brand buzz and brand equity, with the departure of a senior marketing executive estimated to reduce brand buzz and equity by approximately 3.9% and 1.5% of the median within-firm standard deviation, respectively. Effects are higher for employees in digital marketing roles and for employees who find another similar- or higher-seniority marketing job within 6 months (“successfully reemployed”), and are lower for those who do not secure another marketing job after their exit (“non-reemployed”). Turnover of mid-level managers and junior employees produces significant and meaningful (albeit monotonically smaller) negative impacts. Results are robust to both exhaustive two-way fixed effects and IV analysis based on turnover at peer-of-peer firms, in both cases controlling for industry-specific time trends, and compare to null effects in placebo tests. Taken together, our study provides novel quantitative estimates of the importance of marketing professionals for brands.