Sheth Foundation Dissertation Award

With the early support it provided, The Sheth Foundation was instrumental in helping fund my dissertation, which took me to India to study how foreign companies adapt to the Indian market. Not only did I manage to finish an interesting dissertation which won 3 awards, I also met my wife in India so the Sheth Foundation had a real impact on my life!

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.

I am extremely grateful to the Sheth Foundation for their financial support of my research area–low literate consumers. I was blessed to receive multiple dissertation grants sponsored in part by the Sheth Foundation. These grants helped me collect depth interviews with adults who possess limited literacy skills. Because the Sheth Foundation believed in the potential value of my work, I gained confidence and committed myself to working in a previously unexplored area. The dissertation resulted in a Robert Ferber Award-winning article published in the Journal of Consumer Research…a huge accomplishment that would not have materialized without the support (both financial and conceptual feedback) of the Sheth Foundation and its partners. Thank you from the bottom of my heart….

The Sheth foundation supported my doctoral dissertation, which was a costly project. I am grateful for the financial support I received. The foundation also provided helpful comments on my work, which contributed positively to the quality of the dissertation. The foundation values and rewards work that is relevant not only to practitioners or academics, but also has implications for public policy. I am very thankful for their involvement in and continued support of the ACR doctoral dissertation awards.

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.