University of Wisconsin-Madison
University of Wisconsin-Madison
University of Wisconsin-Madison
The annual AMA/Marketing Science Institute/H. Paul Root award is given to the Journal of Marketing article that has made the most significant contribution to the advancement of the practice of marketing in a calendar year. It is cosponsored by the American Marketing Association and the Marketing Science Institute, and it honors past AMA Board Chair H. Paul Root, who also served as president of MSI from 1990 to 1998. The winners of the 2025 AMA/MSI/H. Paul Root Award are Neeraj Arora, Ishita Chakraborty, and Yohei Nishimura for their article “AI–Human Hybrids for Marketing Research: Leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) as Collaborators,” (Volume 89, Issue 2).
The selection committee, composed of Rebecca J. Slotegraaf (Indiana University), Marnik Dekimpe (Tilburg University), and Earl Taylor (Marketing Science Institute) noted:
“The AMA/Marketing Science Institute/H. Paul Root award recognizes a Journal of Marketing article that has made a significant contribution to advancing the practice of marketing. As such, we judged articles based on their rigor, innovation, breadth of impact, and practical relevance.
‘AI-Human Hybrids for Marketing Research: Leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) as Collaborators’ by Neeraj Arora, Ishita Chakraborty, and Yohei Nishimura offers evidence that humans and LLMs possess complementary skills in the marketing research process and that AI-human hybrid workflows outperform either AI-only or human-only approaches. The research offers real-world implications and practical guidance as the authors highlight how LLMs can help identify insights from overlooked customer segments, demonstrate a definitive exemplar for use of synthetic respondents, and offer roadmaps for both qualitative and quantitative research to guide practitioners and researchers.
There is already evidence of its impact, with the JM publication generating two invited, forthcoming features in MIT Sloan Management Review and NIM Marketing Intelligence Review. Moreover, as of early April 2026, the paper has already accumulated over 170 citations on Google Scholar and it ranks in the top 5% of all research outputs scored by Altmetric.”
A detailed summary of this research is available here.
The authors will be honored at the 2026 AMA Summer Academic Conference, July 24-26 in Denver, CO. Previous recipients of this award can be found here.
The other excellent finalists for this award are:
- “Where A/B Testing Goes Wrong: How Divergent Delivery Affects What Online Experiments Cannot (and Can) Tell You About How Customers Respond to Advertising,” by Michael Braun and Eric M. Schwartz
- “New Tools, New Rules: A Practical Guide to Effective and Responsible Generative AI Use for Surveys and Experiments in Research,” by Simon J. Blanchard, Nofar Duani, Aaron M. Garvey, Oded Netzer, and Travis Tae Oh
Go to the Journal of Marketing