Weitz honored with lifetime achievement award

Gainesville, Fla. – Bart Weitz, JCPenney Eminent Scholar and Professor of Marketing at the University of Florida, has been honored with the 2007 IOSIG Lifetime Achievement Award. The Interorganizational Special Interest Group (IOSIG) of the American Marketing Association (AMA) has been designed to facilitate interaction among academic members of the AMA with an interest in channels of distribution, business-to-business marketing, and business alliances.

Professor Weitz has been on the faculty of the University’s Warrington College of Business Administration since 1985, where he also serves as executive director of the David F. Miller Center for Retailing Education and Research, one of just four business school-based retail centers in the country. His research interests are in developing partnering relationships between firms in distribution channels, motivating and compensating salespeople, improving customer service, and electronic commerce.

Professor Weitz literally wrote the book on selling, Retailing Management, the best-selling textbook in the retailing market, now in its sixth edition. The annual symposium sponsored by the Miller Center, “Retailing Smarter,” is the largest university-based conference for retail managers and students in the US. Weitz is a past chair of the AMA and, among his many honors, was named the AMA Distinguished Educator in 1998.

The IOSIG has previously conferred awards upon Weitz, including Sales Force Best Paper (1999) and the Louis Stern Award—in 2000, and again in 2005, along with UF colleagues Joe Alba, Rich Lutz, Chris Janiszewski, and Alan Sawyer. The Lifetime Achievement Award selection committee included chair Bob Dwyer (University of Cincinnati), Jean Johnson (Washington State University), and Rajdeep Grewal (Penn State University).