Smith’s Jie Zhang and PhD Graduate Min Kim Earn Prestigious AMA Award

Marketing research by Smith professor Jie Zhang and doctoral graduate Min Kim has drawn the 2025 Don Lehmann Award from the American Marketing Association (AMA) for best dissertation-based article recently published in the Journal of Marketing or Journal of Marketing Research.

The honor recognizes “Discovering Online Shopping Preference Structures in Large and Frequently Changing Store Assortments” published in the Journal of Marketing Research in 2023. The work produced a methodology “to predict that out of the future products that a retailer may sell, which ones would offer the closest fit to what customers want,” said Zhang at the time of publication.

Zhang is Dean’s Professor of Marketing Harvey Sanders Fellow of Retail Management at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business. Kim, who completed his Smith marketing PhD in 2020, is an assistant professor at National University of Singapore. 

Previous Smith-related work selected for the Lehmann award by the AMA’s Marketing Research Special Interest Group includes, by award-year:

• 2022 – Dean’s Chair in Marketing Science P.K. Kannan and Xian Gu (PhD 2019) for “The Dark Side of Mobile App Adoption: Examining the Impact on Customers’ Multichannel Purchase (summarized)”
• 2020 – Michel Wedel, Distinguished University Professor and PepsiCo Chair in Consumer Science with Xuan Liu (PhD 2015) and Savannah W. Shi (PhD 2011) for “Video Content Marketing: The Making of Clips” (research summary, award story)
• 2019 – Lan Luo (2005), as supervising then-PhD/incoming Smith professor Courtney Paulson for “Efficient Large-Scale Internet Media Selection Optimization for Online Display Advertising” (summarized)
• 2009 – P.K. Kannan with Lan Luo and Brian Ratchford for “Incorporating Subjective Characteristics in Product Design and Evaluations”
• 2007 – Roland Rust, Distinguished University Professor and David Bruce Smith Chair in Marketing with Debora V. Thompson (PhD 2006) with Rebecca Hamilton for “Feature Fatigue: When Product Capabilities Become Too Much of a Good Thing” (summary)

Also, prior to joining the Smith marketing faculty, Associate Professor Daniel McCarthy won the Lehmann award in 2018 for “Valuing Subscription-Based Businesses Using Publicly Disclosed Customer Data” as did Associate Professor Michael Trusov in 2011 for “Determining Influential Users in Internet Social Networks.” And prior to arriving at Smith, Roland Rust supervised the Lehmann-winning "Modeling Fuzzy Data in Qualitative Marketing Research.”

Read more about the Smith PhD Program and Smith’s Marketing Department.