ARC: Connections: ELMAR: Posting areas: management: award

Related ARContent: Journal of Marketing

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Sheth Foundation/Journal of Marketing Award

Roland T. Rust, Katherine N. Lemon, and Valarie A. Zeithaml are the recipients of the 2009 Sheth Foundation/Journal of Marketing Award for their article “Return on Marketing: Using Customer Equity to Focus Marketing Strategy,” which appeared in the January 2004 (Vol. 68, No. 1) issue of Journal of Marketing (JM). The award is administered through the American Marketing Association Foundation.

Nominations for the award were solicited from members of the JM Editorial Review Board, and a committee of former JM and JMR editors—David W. Stewart (chair), Jerry Wind, and Russ Winer—made the selection. The award is given to honor articles that have made long-term contributions to the discipline of marketing. The award recognizes scholarship based on the benefits of time and hindsight and acknowledges contributions and outcomes made to marketing theory and practice. This year, the committee considered all articles published in JM between 2000 and 2004. The committee also weighs information obtained from letters of nomination and citation analyses.

The Sheth Foundation/Journal of Marketing Award was established through the generosity of the Sheth Foundation. The criteria for selection include the quality of the article’s contribution to theory and practice, the article’s originality, its technical competence, and its impact on the field of marketing. Articles eligible for the award must have been published at least five years but not more than ten years earlier.

Fourteen different articles were nominated. This article was one of only two that received multiple nominations. In the opinion of the selection committee, the article has had tremendous impact in a relatively short time. It has been cited more than 400 times since its publication. As one nomination stated: “The paper presents a solution to an issue of ongoing importance in the academic and business community: How to determine the [return on investment] of different marketing investments in order to choose the most promising one? The outstanding contribution of this article lies, for me, in the extremely easy way in which the method can be implemented by any company.” Another nomination observed that “the Rust–Lemon–Zeithaml approach, showing that customer equity could be a major driver of marketing strategy, and used as a general tool for evaluating marketing return on investment, stimulated a boom in research related to customer equity.” A nomination also noted that “the article’s overall excellence has already been evidenced by two best article awards, the article has generated more than double the number of top-journal citations per year than any of the other top-cited JM articles from the award period, and the approach has been applied in practice by many leading companies.” The committee believed that the significant impact of the article on both academic research and the practice of marketing made it an especially worthy selection for the Sheth/Journal of Marketing Award.

The award will be presented at the American Marketing Association’s 2010 Winter Marketing Educators’ Conference to be held February 19–22, at the Sheraton New Orleans in New Orleans, Louisiana.

• Roland T. Rust is Distinguished University Professor and David Bruce Smith Chair in Marketing in the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland, where he is also Chair of the Marketing Department and founder and Executive Director of two research centers: the Center for Excellence in Service and the Center for Complexity in Business.
• Katherine N. Lemon is Accenture Professor in the Carroll School of Management at Boston College.
• Valarie A. Zeithaml is David S. Van Pelt Family Distinguished Professor of Marketing in the Kenan-Flagler School of Business at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

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