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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 2026 Sheth Foundation/Journal of Marketing Award are Stefano Puntoni, Rebecca Walker Reczek, Markus Giesler, and Simona Botti for their article, “Consumers and Artificial Intelligence: An Experiential Perspective” (Volume 85, Issue 1).
The selection committee, composed of Tülin Erdem (New York University), Harald van Heerde (University of New South Wales), and Marc Fischer (University of Cologne), noted:
“We are delighted to announce that ‘Consumers and Artificial Intelligence: An Experiential Perspective,’ by Stefano Puntoni, Rebecca Walker Reczek, Markus Giesler, and Simona Botti, published in the Journal of Marketing in 2021, has been selected as the winner of the 2026 Sheth Foundation/Journal of Marketing Award. Selected from a highly competitive set of four finalists, the winning article was recognized for its exceptionally strong long-term contribution to marketing theory and practice by conceptualizing how AI reshapes consumer decision-making and marketplace relationships. The article was the first to ask a question that is both urgent and fascinating: ‘What kind of consumer experiences does AI give rise to?’ and addressed this question with a comprehensive and agenda-setting new conceptual framework integrating insights from marketing research with technological, psychological, and sociological perspectives. Since its publication, the article has been widely cited across disciplines, with over 1,500 Google Scholar citations as of April 2026. Given the exponential rise of AI in marketing and the thought-provoking predictions the paper made about how AI would affect consumer research, it was clearly a case of exactly the right paper at the exactly right time, and therefore a very worthy recipient of the 2026 Sheth Foundation/Journal of Marketing Award.”
A summary of this groundbreaking article 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 the award were:
- “Marketing Agility: The Concept, Antecedents, and a Research Agenda,” by Kartik Kalaignanam, Kapil R. Tuli, Tarun Kushwaha, Leonard Lee, and David Gal
- “The Concept of Authenticity: What It Means to Consumers,” by Joseph C. Nunes, Andrea Ordanini, and Gaia Giambastiani
- “Marketplace Literacy as a Pathway to a Better World: Evidence from Field Experiments in Low-Access Subsistence Marketplaces,” by Madhubalan Viswanathan, Nita Umashankar, Arun Sreekumar, and Ashley Goreczny
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