From October 15 to 27, Manfred Krafft visited research partners in Chicago, New York City, and Washington, DC. He first met Anne Coughlan, a marketing professor at Northwestern University, to continue his research on top performing direct selling distributors. Both professors discussed research results, conducted additional analyses, and drafted a presentation of their findings. Professor Krafft also met with Vijay Viswanathan from Northwestern’s IMC group and discussed future research initiatives. Among others, Vijay and Manfred coordinated and planned an intense week of research with Tammo Bijmolt (Groningen) and Javier Sese. They will meet in Münster in mid-January 2019 to work on a B2B research initiative.

Subsequently, professor Krafft spent an extended weekend in New York City to discuss research initiatives with Vicki Morwitz (New York University) on effects of social presence in online PWYW applications. He also interacted with Don Lehmann from Columbia University to investigate whether Dr. Lehmann would be willing to contribute as a co-author to a special issue of Journal of Interactive Marketing on big data, CRM and technology, and artificial intelligence.

Finally, Manfred Krafft presented updated findings on key drivers of top performance among direct selling distributors in Washington, DC. He visited the Direct Selling Educational Foundation (DSEF) to share recent insights from his joint work with Anne Coughlan and Julian Allendorf (IfM). After presenting his research, he discussed proposals for future research on related topics with DSEF’s executive director Gary M. Huggins and four staff members of DSEF. His trip was quite rewarding as DSEF agreed to support new research over the next two years by providing an additional research budget of more than 40,000 €.