2008 Headlines
Vithala Rao Wins Prestigious Charles Coolidge Parlin Marketing Award
American Marketing Association Recognizes Outstanding Research and Scholarship
September 15, 2008 | Ithaca, NY | Professor Vithala R. Rao has been honored with the Charles Coolidge Parlin Marketing Research Award presented by the American Marketing Association (AMA) and the American Marketing Association Foundation (AMAF). Rao, the Dean W. Malott Professor of Management and Professor of Marketing and Quantitative Methods, will receive the award at a ceremony today at the Marriott Copley Place in Boston.
The award recognizes distinguished academics and practitioners who have demonstrated outstanding leadership and sustained impact on advancing the evolving profession of marketing research over an extended period of time. The award was established in 1945 by the Philadelphia Chapter of the AMA and The Wharton School in association with the Curtis Publishing Company to honor persons who have made outstanding contributions to the field of marketing research.
Professor Rao has shown tremendous innovation in bringing new marketing research methods and models to the discipline. His methodological innovations are widely used by firms, especially conjoint analysis, product positioning, and brand equity measurement. He has published over 110 articles and four books including Analysis for Strategic Marketing, and continues to be a productive and innovative scholar. He has chaired ten PhD dissertations.
His current work includes upgrading approach to conjoint analysis, meta-attributes for bundle/product design, trade promotions, demand estimation for preannounced products, and linking firms' branding strategies to their financial performance. He is the recipient of the Johnson School's Faculty Research Award in 2000-01 and the Robert D. Buzzell Award for the Best Paper by the Marketing Science Institute in 2005.
He serves on the editorial boards of Marketing Science, Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Marketing, and Journal of Business to Business Marketing.
"This is a great honor to be recognized by my peers and by the leading organization in the world for marketing professionals," Rao said.
One of Rao's latest research papers is forthcoming in the Journal of Marketing Research. "Eliciting Preference for Complex Products: A Web-Based Upgrading Method" was co-authored by Min Ding of Penn State University and Young-Hoon Park of the Johnson School at Cornell University and offers a new incentive-aligned approach to eliciting attribute preferences in which consumers upgrade a product profile one attribute at a time and state their willingness to pay for each potential upgrade.
"This award is well-deserved and illustrates the quality of Professor Rao's outstanding research and scholarship," said Dean L. Joseph Thomas. "Professor Rao's scholarship has greatly added to our understanding of marketing and quantitative analysis concerning consumers, markets and businesses."
