Newswise — Associate Professor of Marketing and Dean’s Research Fellow Susan Fournier received one of the world’s most prestigious marketing awards in October at the annual meeting of the Association for Consumer Research (ACR) Conference in St Louis.
Fournier received ACR’s Long-Term Contribution to Consumer Research Award, granted for her 1998 article, “Consumers and their Brands: Developing Relationship Theory in Consumer Research,” Journal of Consumer Research, 24 (March), 343-373).
Fournier is only the fourth person so honored and her article was selected from 1139 eligible articles.The rare award honors the long-term contribution of an article—papers must be ten years old or older—that appeared in the Journal of Consumer Research, the field’s premier research journal.
The president of the association convenes a five-person task force to determine the article with the greatest contribution to the field from the eligibility pool (this year, there were 1139 eligible articles published between the Journal’s founding in 1974 through 2001). After discussion, review of pertinent data, and debate, the task force may decide that no award will be given.
Her particular achievement is distinct in several ways. She is the first female to receive the award. She is the first recipient to receive the award for work based on a dissertation. And her paper is the “youngest” of all recipient articles, awarded the distinction in its 13th year while the others had been in circulation 21, 17, and 20 years, respectively.
The selection committee noted that her article also enjoys the greatest velocity (speed and rate of pickup in citations) of any article ever published in JCR and consistently ranks at the top of the list of most-downloaded papers from the Journal website since they began tracking.
“With more than 1800 Google cites and more than 500 Web of Science citations, Professor Fournier’s article has had an enormous impact on the field of consumer research,” said Associate Dean for Research and Faculty Jeff Inman, of the Katz Graduate School of Business, University of Pittsburgh, who chaired the 2011 selection committee. “She opened the door to a new stream of research in the area of consumer relationship theory.”
Fournier’s article has received two other awards previously: Journal of Consumer Research Best Article award in 2001 and Honorable Mention for the Ferber Award for Best Published Dissertation in 1999.
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