Robert Palmatier wins 2023 Stern and Sheth Awards for best papers in top marketing journals

Rob Palmatier

Robert Palmatier may need to install another shelf in his trophy case.

Palmatier, a professor of marketing and the John C. Narver Endowed Professor in Business Administration at the UW Foster School of Business, has added to an enormously decorated academic career with two new prestigious awards this May alone: the Louis W. Stern Award from the American Marketing Association and the Jagdish N. Sheth Award from the Academy of Marketing Sciences.

Stern Award

Palmatier received this year’s Louis W. Stern Award for the enduring impact of his 2016 Journal of Marketing paper “Dynamic Relationship Marketing,” co-authored with Jonathan Zhang, George F. Watson IV and Rajiv Dant. The Stern Award recognizes an outstanding study that has made a significant contribution to the literature on marketing and channels of distribution between three and eight years after its publication.

“This high-quality article has significantly impacted the B2B relationship marketing literature,” noted the award committee of Palmatier’s winning paper. “The authors theoretically and empirically demonstrate that three positive (exploration, endowment and recovery) and two negative (neglect and betrayal) relationship migration mechanisms capture movement across four different relationship states. They conclude that relationship marketing strategies are state-specific, thereby deepening our understanding of the theoretical and practical nuances to relationship marketing strategies.”

Sheth Award

The 2023 Jagdish N. Sheth Award honors Palmatier’s 2022 Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science paper, “Online Influencer Marketing,” co-authored with Fine F. Leung and Flora F. Gu.

This paper defines the practice of marketing via social media influencers, describes the history and background of this phenomenon and delineates its unique features to set the boundaries for this fast-emerging concept. The authors propose that online influencer marketing can be understood as leveraging influencer resources (including follower networks and trust, personal positioning and communication content) to enhance a firm’s marketing effectiveness. Finally, the paper identifies benefits and potential threats, and outlines key strategies for effectively managing online influencer marketing campaigns.

And many more…

Palmatier, a former Naval officer and senior executive at Fortune 500 firms, has been a publishing powerhouse since his academic career began two decades ago. He has published 101 papers and ten books since 2004, offering valuable insights into CRM marketing, loyalty programs, online marketing, data privacy, influencer marketing, sales management and sales channels and retail management.

Most recent among his enormous collection of research accolades are the Sheth Journal of Marketing Award (2016, 2022), the American Marketing Association Berry Book Award (2021), the Lifetime Achievement Award from the AMA Interorganizational Research Group (2020), and the AMA’s Vijay Mahajan Award for career contributions to marketing strategy (2019).

The AMA listed him #6 in its 2023 ranking of the 50 most productive scholars in the world in the marketing discipline’s top four journals over the past decade (Foster’s Department of Marketing and International Business came in at #10).

In addition to the quantity and quality of his research, Palmatier has also been lauded for his outsize influence on the marketing discipline. A 2022 study out of Stanford University counts him among the top 0.1% of most-cited scientific scholars in the world who have published at least five papers in the past 60 years. The same index lists him #42 among the 12,338 most-cited marketing researchers tracked over the same period.

Palmatier is past co-editor of the Journal of Marketing and the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, and founding research director of the Foster School’s Center for Sales and Marketing Strategy.