Developing Marketing Scholars Globally

It is a great honor to have been chosen for the ACR/Sheth Foundation Dissertation Proposal 2009 Award. The award is a true testament of the Sheth Foundation commitment to excellence in marketing research. I am always inspired by Sheth’s work on relationship marketing and customer value. The award transforms that inspiration of mine into academic research that I’m proud to share with my colleagues in the field. Thank you.

In 2008, I was fortunate to receive the Association for Consumer Research (ACR)/Sheth Foundation Dissertation Grant in the Cross-Cultural/Global Track. I had also been selected to represent the university where I was studying for my PhD (The University of California, Irvine), as UC Irvine’s Consortium Fellow to attend the 2008 American Marketing Association (AMA) Sheth Foundation Doctoral Consortium. In 2007 and 2009, I was again a recipient of the Academy of Marketing Science (AMS) Sheth Foundation Marketing Doctoral Student Association Travel Grants, which allowed me to attend the AMS conferences in those years. The paper I presented at the 2007 AMS conference in Coral Gables, FL was awarded the Jane K. Fenyo Best Paper Award for Student Research. I benefited not only from the financial components of the awards, which allowed me to present my research at conferences and complete my dissertation, but the recognition allowed my research to be acknowledged by my peers in academia.

To say that the Sheth Foundation has had a tremendous impact on my academic career would be an understatement. I have a tremendous respect for Madhuri and Jagdish Sheth and what the Sheth Foundation has committed to achieving in the marketing academic community. Like many other doctoral students, I have had the opportunity to interact with Jagdish Sheth and benefit from his advice and kindness to doctoral students. As an assistant professor, I am convinced that my path to successful completion of the doctoral degree in marketing, and my subsequent acceptance of an academic position, was facilitated by the indirect support of the Sheth Foundation during my years in the doctoral program. Thank you.

The SHETH Dissertation award in consumer psychology, for which I was a runner-up, is noteworthy to me in several respects. First, as part of the application process, the reviewers provided useful feedback on my proposal, which influenced my thinking and the subsequent experiments I ultimately carried out. Second, as a runner-up I was given funding to present at the Society for Consumer Psychology, which served as an excellent way to share and receive feedback on my dissertation as a graduate student. These were influential in my career as they culminated in successfully publishing my research in the society’s journal, the Journal of Consumer Psychology. Thus, to me, the award, and the activities attached to it, provided a remarkable means for cultivating and stimulating the thinking and ideas early in my career. I valued the experience so much that I urge Ph.D. students to apply for the award.