Their paper is considered exceptional work that can make a meaningful influence on the discipline.
Hans Hansen, an associate professor of management; Debra Laverie, a professor of marketing; and Kelley Cours Anderson, a marketing doctoral student in the Jerry S. Rawls College of Business; have been recognized as the recipients of the Franco Nicosia Award for the Best Competitive Paper by the Association for Consumer Research (ACR). Their paper was selected by the conference chairs from a pool of 280 competitive submissions at the ACR's annual conference in Atlanta, Georgia, in October.
Left to right: Leonard Lee, conference chair; Kelley Cours Anderson, TTU; Lauren
Block and Rajesh Bagchi, conference chairs.
The paper, "The Path from Innovative Marketing Medium to Value-Creation: An Experience in Virtual Reality," is a part of Anderson's dissertation research. The study explores how virtual reality tours can influence value creation. They investigated this question in the residential real estate industry, engaging in an extensive qualitative analysis of archival documentation, online video, and comments, as well as interviews with buyers, sellers, real estate agents, photographers and service providers. The authors propose a process model of how consumers' use of innovative marketing mediums co-create value. Consumers' engagement with the medium offers multiple benefits to consumers, including added convenience in the search process, improved quality perceptions in the home and the agent, increased trust in the agent and themselves and shifts the bonding process to the house earlier.
"ACR is an extremely competitive conference and the Nicosia Award goes to a paper that several reviewers believe has the potential for significant scholarly impact," said Rajiv Vaidyanathan, executive director of ACR and professor of marketing at the University of Minnesota Duluth in an announcement about the award on ACR's website.
The award was established in 1998 in honor of Professor Franco Nicosia of the University of California, Berkeley and is funded by the Sheth Foundation.
"We are incredibly honored and humbled that our paper was a recipient of the Franco Nicosia Award," said Anderson. "We are excited to prepare this piece further for publication."
Learn more about Anderson's research.
About the ACR
The Association for Consumer Research (ACR) was founded in 1969 by a small group of consumer behavior researchers whose informal meeting at the Ohio State University led to the vision of a yearly conference devoted to the study of consumer behavior. Today, ACR's mission is to advance consumer research and facilitate the exchange of scholarly information among members of academia, industry, and government worldwide. One of the key functions of ACR is to facilitate the growth and advancement of the field of consumer research. ACR hosts and supports a number of conferences as well as reviews and publishes scholarly research publications.