Thao Le won Best Flash Talk and Poster presentation at the 2025 ISMS Marketing Science Conference

At ISMS 2025, Thao presented research project “Heterogeneous-Time Product Influence Network”, which is a joint work with research fellows Bernd Heidergott (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam), Ines Lindner (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam), and Gui Liberali (Erasmus University Rotterdam). The ISMS Marketing Science Conference is the biggest international gathering in Marketing.

In this project, they model a saturated market as a network, where competing products are represented as nodes, and consumers switch between products with heterogeneous probabilities and timing. Based on this model, they introduce a novel Gradient-based Network Optimization framework to identify the minimal changes (or interventions) in consumer purchase patterns that enable a brand to achieve its target sales rates, while keeping total market demand fixed.

Their research offers a novel and flexible analytical toolkit to help managers guide their marketing actions and budgets, and policymakers to quantify the impact of consumer purchase shifts on brand outcomes.

Thao looks forward to developing this research into an impactful paper.

Thao is an alumna of Tinbergen Institute's Research Master in Business Data Science and currently a PhD candidate at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her supervisors are Bernd Heidergott and Ines Lindner.