Posted on September 19, 2017 by Joanna Carver
The Carolan Research Institute has donated $100,000 to the UTSA College of Business Department of Marketing in support of marketing research.
The institute was established to further the pursuit of behavioral science as it pertains to everyday human action and decision-making.
“Our department is extremely grateful for the support that we’ve received from the Carolan Research Institute,” said Suman Basuroy, chair of the Department of Marketing. “The award will allow us to support the high-quality research objectives of our doctoral students and faculty.”
The institute was founded by the late Geraldine Fennell, a visiting faculty researcher at UTSA from 2007-2013. Fennell, who died in 2014, was an accomplished marketing practitioner and academic researcher. In her earlier career, she worked for Unilever and J. Walter Thompson and received her Ph.D. in social psychology from the City University of New York.
Her research on developing a conceptual framework for prospective customer wants was published in numerous marketing journals and conference proceedings, including the elite Journal of Marketing.
“Geraldine was a renaissance woman who successfully merged business practice and marketing theory; she pursued what she thought was right and never backed down,” said Joel Saegert, professor emeritus of marketing and trustee of the institute. “I worked with her for over 25 years on her upstream marketing approach to exploring prospective customers’ heterogeneous wants and desires in the pursuit of successful brand offerings. It seems only fitting that the institute is funding research in support of her research ideals.”
Wendy Frost—
Please send your comments to: wendy.frost@utsa.edu
— Joanna Carver
