Research

 

CoB Presents Publication Awards Fall 2007

The College of Business recently presented its annual awards for outstanding publications to faculty members Val Larsen, Raktim Pal, Irvine Clarke III, Theresa Flaherty and Mike Yankey. Each will receive a salary supplement, as well as an engraved award and public recognition on a plaque displayed in Showker Hall, for their contributions to research within their respective fields. The following awards were presented.


Val Larsen, an associate professor of marketing, received the Best Academic Publication award for “Points of View and Pieces of Time: A Taxonomy of Image Attributes,” which he co-authored with colleagues from other institutions. The article, which appeared in the June 2004 issue of Journal of Consumer Research, defines the attributes of stimuli in advertising, such as camera angles, pace, point of view and sequence. Having a better analysis of the visual elements of marketing communications, Larsen says, will make it possible to understand how an advertisement might affect people and predict the likely outcomes. “The more we can say about the likely effects of those stimuli on people, the more cost effective we can be in deploying our promotional budgets.”

A professor in the CIS and MS department, Raktim Pal received the Best Practitioner Award for his publication, “Auto-ID: Managing Anything, Anywhere, Anytime in the Supply Chain.” Co-authored with a colleague from another university, the article was published in Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery in 2005. The article offers suggestions for how a company’s supply chain operation may be handled more efficiently using the Auto-ID (or radio frequency identification) technology, which grew out of the bar codes and bar code readers that emerged in retail decades ago. Used to its fullest capabilities, Pal says, the technology has potential to save labor costs, reduce inventory, track lost items and increase sales. While there currently are several road blocks to the technology, such as privacy concerns and cost of the RFID tags, Pal and his co-author assert that “Auto-ID is a promising technology with the potential to revolutionize all facets of the supply chain; a well-organized, focused effort can help it quickly fulfill that promise.”

The award for Best Educational Publication was presented to Irvine Clarke III, Theresa Flaherty and Mike Yankey for their article, “Teaching the Visual Learner: The Use of Visual Summaries in Marketing Education.” It was published last year in the Journal of Marketing Education. After reading a study finding that about 40 percent of marketing students are visual learners who better retain material presented through visual cues such as pictures, diagrams, flow charts and demonstrations, the trio decided to examine the effects of visual summaries on students. For one marketing class, they developed “pictures” of each lecture that closely resembled a map, with the use of connecting lines and symbols, and for another identical course, they taught using the traditional lecture format. The results showed dramatic increases in student performance when the visual elements were incorporated in the classroom lessons, and the students reported greater satisfaction. “If we can present our material in ways that match with students’ learning styles, they perform better,” Clarke says. “If we better understand their learning styles, then we have a better chance of reaching them.”