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The annual Sheth Foundation/Journal of Marketing Award honors a Journal of Marketing article that has made long-term contributions to the field of marketing. An article is eligible for consideration to receive the award in the fifth year after its publication. The criteria for selection include the quality of the article’s contribution to theory and practice, its originality, its technical competence (if relevant), and its impact on the field of marketing.
The winners of the 2025 Sheth Foundation/Journal of Marketing Award are Jonah Berger, Ashlee Humphreys, Stephan Ludwig, Wendy W. Moe, Oded Netzer, and David A. Schweidel for their article, “Uniting the Tribes: Using Text for Marketing Insight” (Volume 84, Issue 1).
The selection committee, composed of Shrihari (Hari) Sridhar (Texas A&M University), Anocha Aribarg (University of Michigan), and Frank Germann (University of Notre Dame), noted:
“We are delighted to announce that ‘Uniting the Tribes: Using Text for Marketing Insight’ by Jonah Berger, Ashlee Humphreys, Stephan Ludwig, Wendy W. Moe, Oded Netzer, and David A. Schweidel, published in the Journal of Marketing in 2020, has been selected as this year’s recipient of the Sheth Foundation/Journal of Marketing Award. Chosen from an outstanding group of four finalists, each of which made significant contributions to the field, the winning article was recognized for its extraordinary interdisciplinary reach, relevance to both theory and practice, and timely focus on a rapidly evolving methodological frontier.
‘Uniting the Tribes’ offers a comprehensive and integrative synthesis of how automated textual analysis can be used to generate marketing insight. The authors examine how text reflects the producer and the context in which it was created, as well as how it shapes audience perceptions and behaviors. With clear guidance on both prediction and interpretation, the article provides a toolkit of methods, metrics, and best practices for analyzing unstructured text data.
Since its publication, the article has had an impressive reach and influence. It has been downloaded nearly 50,000 times and is the most cited Journal of Marketing article of its publication year, with approximately 800 citations on Google Scholar and over 400 on Web of Science. The article is widely used in master’s and doctoral-level marketing courses at top universities around the globe. It was also featured in webinars hosted by the American Marketing Association and the Marketing Science Institute, showcasing its practical relevance and educational utility.
Beyond the field of marketing, the article has been cited across a diverse range of disciplines—psychology, computer science, education, medicine, sociology, and ethics—and in top-tier scientific outlets such as Science and PNAS. Many of the papers it has influenced have themselves become highly cited, underscoring the foundational role this article has played in advancing scholarship on textual data.
Importantly, the paper has also shaped marketing practice. As business practitioners increasingly seek to draw insights from text data, including customer reviews, service interactions, open-ended survey responses, and social media conversations, firms have gathered large amount of text data but often times are lost on how to analyze these data effectively. This article provides a roadmap for transforming raw language data into strategic value. Its relevance has only grown in the era of large language models (LLMs), which the authors presciently identified as a pivotal development in the future of text-based research.
Finally, the composition of the author team mirrors the article’s core message: that text analysis has the power to unite the diverse subfields of marketing through a shared methodological lens. Their collective effort produced an accessible, rigorous, and influential piece of scholarship that continues to shape how both academics and practitioners understand and leverage text data.”
A summary of this groundbreaking article is available here.
Listen to the authors present their findings:
(source: October 2019 JM Webinar)
The article will be honored at the Summer AMA Academic Conference. Previous recipients of this award can be found here.
The other excellent finalists for the award were:
- “A Theories-in-Use Approach to Building Marketing Theory,” by Valarie A. Zeithaml, Bernard J. Jaworski, Ajay K. Kohli, Kapil R. Tuli, Wolfgang Ulaga, and Gerald Zaltman
- “Corporate Sociopolitical Activism and Firm Value,” by Yashoda Bhagwat, Nooshin L. Warren, Joshua T. Beck, and George F. Watson
- “Creating Boundary-Breaking, Marketing-Relevant Consumer Research,” by Deborah J. MacInnis, Vicki G. Morwitz, Simona Botti, Donna L. Hoffman, Robert V. Kozinets, Donald R. Lehmann, John G. Lynch, Jr, and Cornelia Pechmann
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