Bill Dillon

Bio

William R. Dillon is the Herman W. Lay Professor of Marketing and professor of statistics at the Cox School of Business, Southern Methodist University (SMU).  He also serves as senior associate dean.  He received his PhD in marketing and quantitative methods from the City University of New York.  His articles have appeared in the Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of the American Statistical Association, Marketing Science, Journal of Consumer Research, Management Science, and the Journal of Marketing.  He has also published four books, (Essentials of Marketing Research, Marketing Research in a Marketing Environment, Discrete Discriminant Analysis, and Multivariate Analysis: Methods and Applications), the latter two of which appear in the prestigious Wiley Series in Probability and Statistics. His article “Understanding What‘s in a Brand Rating: A Model for Assessing Brand and Attribute Effects and Their Relationship to Brand Equity” received the 2001-2002 "Paul E. Green Award", which is given each year to the paper published in the Journal of Marketing Research during the previous year that shows or demonstrates the most potential to contribute significantly to the practice of marketing research and research in marketing. In 2002-2003 his article “Incorporating Latent Variables in Discrete Choice Models: Alternative Approaches and Relative Performance” was a runner-up for the same award.

Over the years Professor Dillon has consulted for a number of national and multinational firms.  In 1994 he co-founded Marketing and Planning Systems (MaPS), a Boston-based marketing research consulting firm, which now employs over 80 marketing research professionals.  Clients include AT&T, Coca-Cola, American Express, IBM, UPS, Walt Disney Co., ESPN, Avon, Wal-Mart, HBO, Pfizer, Monsanto, Heineken, The Home Depot, The Campbell Soup Company, Pepperidge Farms, PayPal and Microsoft.  In July 2004, MaPS was acquired by Millward Brown.  Millward Brown is part of the Kantar Group, which is a division within WPP. In 2018 he cofounded Group Avant a marketing research consultancy, specializing in traditional and digital segmentation and targeting.

Teaching

Research

Dillon's general areas of interest include segmentation, positioning, market structure and issues related to the use of latent class/mixture models and covariance structure models.  His recent interests center on dynamic structural equation models, models for measuring brand equity, consumer-product relationships, and customer engagement optimization.

Select Publications

A State-Space Approach for Structural Equation Model with Time Series Cross-Sectional Data,”, Structural Equation Modeling: A Multidisciplinary Journal; co-authored with Joonwook Park and Seokoo Lee, (March-April 2019), Vol. 26, No. 2, pp. 236-259.

A New Bayesian Spatial Model for Brand Positioning,” Journal of Marketing Modeling,” co-authored with Joonwook Park, Priyali Rajagopal, Seoil Chaiy and Wayne DeSarbo, (September 2017), Vol. 12 No. 3, pp. 404-431.