Maryland Smith’s Wedel To Receive Top Marketing Award

Michel Wedel, renowned marketing professor and eye-tracking expert at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business, is a recipient of the 20th Paul D. Converse Award. He is one of four recipients of the prestigious honor, given every four years by the Gies College of Business at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign to honor "significant contributions to marketing theory and to the advancement of science in marketing." It’s the latest recognition for Wedel, Distinguished University Professor and the PepsiCo Chair in Consumer Science, who won four other lifetime achievement awards in the past year.

In October 2019, Wedel received the American Marketing Association’s 2019 Robert J. Lavidge Global Marketing Research Award, a lifetime achievement award for his prolific research and contributions as an educator. He was also named winner of the 2019 AMA-Irwin-McGraw-Hill Distinguished Marketing Educator Award. In September, he accepted the 2019 Ubbo Emmius Medal for science merits at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. And earlier last year, he was honored with the Buck Weaver Award from the INFORMS Society for Marketing Science.

Wedel will receive his new award at the Paul D. Converse Marketing Symposium, a two-day celebration of the contributions of the 2020 Converse Award winners, featuring presentations by each recipient. Due to the COVID-19 virus crisis, the symposium has been postponed until fall 2020.

The Converse Award was established by the American Marketing Association in 1946 to honor the memory and legacy of Paul Converse, a professor of business organization and operation at the University of Illinois and a pioneer in the academic study of marketing. The award is conferred by a national jury of scholars and practitioners rather than by local chapters. According to the award organizers, Fortune Magazine describes the recipients of the Converse Awards as being part of a “Marketing Hall of Fame.”

Wedel has more than 200 publications, including research in top marketing journals and book chapters. He has also developed seven software packages that enable PhD students and marketing practitioners to implement methods he developed. He has served on the editorial boards of all the top marketing journals and has been a key contributor in the field and to PhD education in the U.S. and Europe. He has chaired or co-chaired 21 PhD dissertations not only in marketing, but also in economics and mathematics.