Marketing chair Joe Alba wins highly-coveted Converse Award
Gainesville, Fla. – Joseph W. Alba, UF Distinguished Professor of Marketing, has been chosen to receive one of the most prestigious awards in the field of marketing research: the Paul D. Converse Award. Alba currently serves as Chair of the department of Marketing. The American Marketing Association conveys the Converse award to individuals for a body of work. Winners are selected in a two-stage process; a national jury of scholars drawn from universities, business and government (including the editorial boards of all the major academic marketing journals) first nominates publications for consideration, and then votes for the most deserving contributions. The paper authored by Alba receiving the most nominations was entitled “Dimensions of Consumer Expertise,” published in the Journal of Consumer Research.
“Joe Alba has long been a highly valued member of the College and a leader in marketing research,” said Dean John Kraft of the Warrington College of Business Administration. “To see him receive this award is as gratifying to me and the rest of his colleagues here as it must be to him—there’s no doubt that he deserves this recognition.”
The Paul D. Converse Award was first established in 1946 to honor those who had pioneered in developing the theory of marketing and the advancement toward science in marketing. Fortune magazine reported the recipients of these awards constitute the “Marketing Hall of Fame,” and Sales Management calls them the highest honors in the marketing field. Indeed, past recipients—such as Louis Stern—have gone on to have subsequent awards named in their honor (Alba and several UF faculty have also won the Stern).
Alba’s published research has appeared 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 connection with his teaching at UF, Alba is a multiple recipient of the MBA Outstanding Teacher Award, and his Ph.D. 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.
One of the most significant criteria for the Converse award is that no contribution is considered eligible until five years after it is generally available to marketing academics or students, by publication or otherwise. This time frame allows for perspective and ensures that the award honors contributions seen as enduring over time. The award was named to honor Converse, Professor of Business Organization and Operation at the University of Illinois, in recognition of his work in developing the field of marketing. He started teaching marketing at the University of Pittsburgh in 1915 and published one of the first widely distributed textbooks in the field in 1921.
