Annual William F. O’Dell Award

Pierre Chandon and Brian Wansink have been selected as the recipients of this year’s William F. O’Dell award for their article “Is Obesity Caused by Calorie Underestimation? A Psychophysical Model of Meal Size Estimation” which appeared in the February 2007 (volume 44, number 1) issue.

The award honors the Journal of Marketing Research article published in 2007 that has made the most significant, long-term contribution to marketing theory, methodology, and/or practice. The selection committee comprised Rik Pieters (Chair), Christine Moorman, and Yuxin Chen. 

• Pierre Chandon is a Professor of Marketing and Director of the INSEAD  Social Sciences Research Centre at INSEAD.
• Brian Wansink is the John S. Dyson Professor of Marketing at Cornell University.

The four other finalists were as follows:

• “Consumer Packaged Goods in the United States: National Brands, Local Branding” (Volume 44, Number 1)
  Bart J. Bronnenberg, Sanjay K. Dhar, and Jean-Pierre Dubé
• “The Predictive Validity of Multiple-Item Versus Single-Item Measures of the Same Constructs” (Volume 44, Number 2)
  Lars Bergkvist and John R. Rossiter
• “Preference Fluency in Choice” (Volume 44, Number 3)
  Nathan Novemsky, Ravi Dhar, Norbert Schwarz, and Itamar Simonson
• “A Model of Consumer Learning for Service Quality and Usage”  (Volume 44, Number 4)
  Raghuram Iyengar, Asim Ansari, and Sunil Gupta
  The committee based its decision on

1) First round votes by the Editorial and Advisory Board of JMR,
2) Citations (SSCI and Google Scholar), and 
3) The committee’s judgment, from reading the papers and supporting letters.

All papers are outstanding and excelled in at least one of the impact criteria. Yet, the Chandon and Wansink paper stood out. It received the highest number of votes by the Editorial and Advisory Board of JMR, and was unanimously and independently selected by the committee as the winner. Moreover, in addition to receiving a significant volume of citations from other scholarly articles, this article has had a significant impact on the practice of marketing, evidence provided in the strong support letter and verified by the committee. This paper has significantly changed the practice of marketing managers, communication experts, and even food scientists and dieticians. It proposes a very new, and initially counterintuitive, way of approaching a vexing problem namely how to reduce food intake (of overweight and obese) consumers. The paper shows that, counter to the shared belief in the field and in theory, overweight people do not underestimate their calorie intake more than other people do. Rather, overweight people choose larger portions and the amount of calories of larger portions are systematically underestimated by all consumers, independent of their weight status. That is important. Not only has this paper had a significant impact on theories of food consumption. It has made a dramatic impact on practice. In fact, one of the studies in the paper, showing that trained dieticians have the same bias as regular consumers have, already exemplifies its impact. Its impact goes beyond this.

The paper has proposed and found strong support for a new theory, which has changed and still is changing marketing practice.

The award is presented annually at the American Marketing Association’s

Summer Educator’s Marketing Educators Conference

held this year on August 17-19 in Chicago, IL.

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