T.J. Weber, Jeff Joireman, David E. Sprott, and Chris Hydock Win 2026 Thomas C. Kinnear/Journal of Public Policy & Marketing Award

T.J. Weber, Jeff Joireman, David E. Sprott, and Chris Hydock are the recipients of the 2026 Thomas C. Kinnear Award for their article, “Differential Response to Corporate Political Advocacy and Corporate Social Responsibility: Implications for Political Polarization and Radicalization” which appeared in the January 2023 issue (Vol. 42, No. 1) of Journal of Public Policy & Marketing (special issue on Marketing to Prevent Radicalization).

T.J. Weber is the MBA Programs Director and an Associate Professor of Marketing in the Orfalea College of Business at California Polytechnic State University. His research focuses on advancing consumer welfare, ameliorating political polarization, and other public policy topics within marketing, such as improving vaccination rates and belief in global warming. T.J. proudly serves on the editorial review boards for Journal of Public Policy and Marketing and Journal of Environmental Psychology.

Jeff Joireman is Professor in the Department of Marketing and International Business and Director of the International Business Institute in the Carson College of Business at Washington State University. He teaches consumer behavior, marketing research, international marketing, and statistics. Jeff’s research focuses on decision making in temporal dilemmas, environmental decision making, service failures, corporate social responsibility, and public policy issues. He has published over 75 articles, many in his fields’ leading journals, including Journal of International Business Studies, Journal of Public Policy & Marketing, Journal of Business Ethics, Journal of Retailing, Journal of Applied Psychology, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. His work has been cited over 17,000 times.

Jeff has reviewed over 250 articles and served on editorial boards for Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Psychological Science, Journal of Environmental Psychology, Group Dynamics, and Current Research in Ecological and Social Psychology. Jeff has also served as Coeditor in Chief for Journal of Environmental Psychology. Jeff has earned numerous honors and awards including multiple Dean’s Excellence Awards, two Outstanding Faculty Service Awards, the Department of Marketing’s Professor of the Year Award, and two Fulbright Awards.

David Sprott is the Henry Y. Hwang Dean and Professor of Marketing in the Peter F. Drucker and Masatoshi Ito Graduate School of Management and is on faculty at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland. His research interests include retailing, branding, influence strategies, and marketing public policy. Prior to his arrival at the Drucker School, David served as Professor of Marketing and Dean of the College of Business at the University of Wyoming. At UW, he led a renewed strategic vision embracing the student experience, quality academic research, and economic engagement of the state. Previously, Sprott served on the faculty at Washington State University for more than two decades and held the Boeing/Scott and Linda Carson Chair of Marketing, among other leadership positions.

He is a recipient of an Outstanding Faculty Research Award from the WSU College of Business. Sprott’s research has been published in leading scholarly journals, including Journal of Applied Psychology, Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, and Journal of Retailing. His teaching interests include retail management, leadership, brand management, consumer behavior, sales management, and research methods at the undergraduate, master, and doctoral levels. He received his PhD in Marketing from the University of South Carolina and earned a BA in Business and an MBA from Kent State University.

Chris Hydock is Assistant Professor of Marketing at the Freeman School of Business at Tulane University. He joined Tulane in 2023 from California Polytechnic State University, where he served as the Richard and Julie Hood Assistant Professor of Marketing. Prior to his time at Cal Poly, Hydock was an Assistant Professor of Research at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business and worked with the Georgetown Institute for Consumer Research. At the Freeman School, Hydock teaches advanced marketing strategy and has previously taught marketing fundamentals.

His research spans the domains of brand activism, consumer reviews, behavior in queues and retail pricing. He employs a variety of methods in his research, including secondary data, surveys, field studies and experiments. Chris’s research has been published in journals including Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, Management Science, and Journal of Public Policy and Marketing. He received his PhD from George Washington University and a BA from the University of Colorado.

The authors note,

We are honored to receive the 2026 Thomas C. Kinnear/Journal of Public Policy & Marketing Award for our publication on how and why consumers differentially respond to corporate political advocacy versus corporate social responsibility initiatives.

Our studies find that companies engaging in corporate social responsibility tend to reap benefits even when the initiative is considered politically salient (e.g., Lego’s commitment to sustainability), while companies engaging in corporate political advocacy nearly always face backlash, because such activities are seen as more controversial. Our studies find this to be true across different outcomes (e.g., attitudinal measures, purchase intentions, social media responses) and in various contexts.

We also find evidence for a key moderator, namely external political efficacy, or the idea that that people can participate in politics and that public institutions are responsive to citizen inputs. Our research suggests that negative consumer responses to Corporate Political Advocacy are concentrated among those lower in political efficacy, who use their marketplace dollars as one way to influence political outcomes.

This work has important implications for companies deciding whether or how to engage with society in political discourse. Further, our research helps researchers across disciplines better understand how increasingly polarized consumers skeptical of government efficacy shape purchasing decisions, social media posts, and attitudes toward organizations.

Lastly, we would like to thank the guest editors of this special issue, Yany Grégoire, Marie Louise Radanielina-Hita, and three helpful reviewers for patiently helping shepherd this paper through the review process. We would further like to thank the editors at the time, Kelly Martin and Maura Scott, for approving a special issue of JPP&M in the important area of radicalization, as it is an understudied area in marketing. Lastly, we would like to thank the current Editorial Review Board of JPP&M and current editors Beth Vallen and Jeremy Kees for selecting our paper for this award.

Named after JPP&M’s founding editor, Thomas C. Kinnear, the award honors articles that make the most significant contribution to the understanding of marketing and public policy issues within a three-year time period. (See a list of previous award winners.) JPP&M editors Jeremy Kees and Beth Vallen oversaw the selection process.

In addition to the winning article, the other excellent finalists for the award were:

• “Marketing and Public Policy Implications of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization,” by M. Paula Fitzgerald, Jeff Langenderfer, Roberta Renzelli-Cain, and Elizabeth A. Critch
  
• “Marketing’s Role in Promoting the Common Good: A Systematic Examination and an Agenda for Future Inquiry,” by Benét DeBerry-Spence, Lez E. Trujillo-Torres, Rumela Sengupta, Kohei Matsumoto, and Jia Chen
  
• “Marketplaces of Misinformation: A Study of How Vaccine Misinformation Is Legitimized on Social Media,” by Giandomenico Di Domenico, Daniel Nunan, and Valentina Pitardi

About Journal of Public Policy & Marketing

Journal of Public Policy & Marketing is a forum for understanding the nexus of marketing and public policy, with each issue featuring a wide-range of topics, including, but not limited to, ecology, ethics and social responsibility, nutrition and health, regulation and deregulation, security and privacy.

About the American Marketing Association

As the leading global professional marketing association, the AMA is the essential community for marketers. From students and practitioners to executives and academics, we aim to elevate the profession, deepen knowledge, and make a lasting impact. The AMA is home to five premier scholarly journals including: Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Public Policy and Marketing, Journal of International Marketing, and Journal of Interactive Marketing. Our industry-leading training events and conferences define future forward practices, while our professional development and PCM® professional certification advance knowledge. With 70 chapters and a presence on 350 college campuses across North America, the AMA fosters a vibrant community of marketers. The association’s philanthropic arm, the AMA’s Foundation, is inspiring a more diverse industry and ensuring marketing research impacts public good. 

AMA views marketing as the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large. You can learn more about AMA’s learning programs and certifications, conferences and events, and scholarly journals at AMA.org.