Joe Alba named winner of 2008 Sheth/JCR Research Award

Gainesville, Fla. – Joseph W. Alba, UF Distinguished Professor of Marketing, was chosen for of one of marketing research’s top honors, the 2008 Sheth Foundation/Journal of Consumer Research Research Award “for a long term contribution to consumer research.” Alba and his coauthor, J. Wesley Hutchinson (former UF faculty member) were selected for the article entitled “Dimensions of Consumer Expertise.” Appearing in JCR in 1987, when the pair were assistant professors in UF’s marketing department, the article has since been cited in more than 1,000 marketing research papers. Alba currently serves as Chair of UF’s Department of Marketing.

Earlier in 2008, Alba was named winner of the AMA’s Paul D. Converse Award, conveyed upon individuals for a body of work, based upon the same article receiving the most nominations from a national jury of scholars drawn from universities, business and government, including the editorial boards of all the major academic marketing journals.

Alba’s article proposed that consumer knowledge has two major components: familiarity and expertise. The authors reviewed psychological literature to provide a useful foundation for research on consumer knowledge, the conceptual organization of which provided two fundamental distinctions. First, consumer expertise is distinguished from product-related experience. Second, five distinct dimensions of expertise were identified: cognitive effort, cognitive structure, analysis, elaboration, and memory. The empirical findings related to each dimension were reviewed and, on the basis of those findings, specific research hypotheses about the effects of expertise on consumer behavior were suggested.

Joe Alba’s research has been published in a variety of journals, including Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Marketing, Journal of Consumer Psychology, Marketing Letters, Psychological Bulletin, Journal of Experimental Psychology, Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, Memory & Cognition, and Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes. He has been a recipient of the Journal of Marketing MSI/Paul Root Award and the AMA Louis Stern Award, has twice been the recipient of the Journal of Consumer Research Outstanding Article Award, and has twice been a finalist for the Journal of Marketing Research O’Dell Award.

Alba has served as president of the Association of Consumer Research and associate editor of the Journal of Consumer Research. He currently serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Consumer Psychology, Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Marketing, International Journal of Research in Marketing, Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, and Marketing Letters. He has twice received the JCR Outstanding Reviewer Award.

In his teaching career at UF, Alba is a multiple recipient of the MBA Outstanding Teacher Award, and his doctoral students have won two Ferber Awards and three John Howard AMA Dissertation Awards. He has been elected to the Phi Beta Kappa, Sigma Xi, and Beta Gamma Sigma academic societies and is a Fellow of both the Society for Consumer Psychology and the American Psychological Association. In 2004, Joe Alba received the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the Society for Consumer Psychology.