One of the prizes, the Gladys and Henry Crown Award for Faculty Excellence, is given to a full-time faculty member in the Graduate School of Business Administration (GBA) whose exceptional performance and devotion to the school’s ideals and goals warrant extraordinary recognition.

The other, the Stanley Fuchs Faculty Award, is presented to a full-time faculty member who has made an impact on students through his or her dedication and commitment to the student body.

“Professor Kabadayi is an exceptional contributor to the School and the University, and we are proud that GBA students have chosen to recognize him with this double honor,” said David A. Gautschi, Ph.D., dean of the Graduate School of Business Administration. “His diverse background in international industry, as well as his research interests, enable him to bring a global perspective to the classroom that can help our graduates compete in a today’s business environment.”

“If anyone deserves both, particularly at the same time, it’s Professor Kabadayi,” said Dawn Lerman, Ph.D., associate professor and area chair of marketing. “He is highly engaged with students in and beyond the classroom, and he demands a lot from them.

“This year, for students in his GBA classes, he purposely raised the bar—which was already quite high—to ensure that they worked hard and got the most out of class,” Lerman said.

Indeed, Kabadayi admits to challenging his students with an interactive teaching style that embodies a holistic approach of care for the whole person—a style that imparts lifelong learning skills to students.

“It is gratifying to me that students recognize the effort that I put into my teaching. They respond by putting effort into their learning,” he said. “I know that I am a demanding and challenging teacher who cares deeply about his students. My goal is to create active learners—not passive students.”

In addition to fulfilling his teaching load with distinction, Kabadayi has also accomplished significant research, with three published papers appearing this year.

“The Role of Wireless Service Provider (WSP) Trust on Consumer Acceptance of SMS Advertising,” written with Luke Kachersky, Ph.D., assistant professor of marketing, will appear in the International Journal of Internet Marketing and Advertising. “Choosing the Right Multiple Channel System to Minimize Transaction Costs” will appear in Industrial Marketing Management. Another paper, “Made In China But Sold At FAO Schwarz,” written with Lerman, was published in the International Marketing Review.

Kabadayi also authored an opinion piece in the Feb. 11 issue of Business Insider on the challenges AT&T faces after losing its iPhone monopoly.

He serves as faculty advisor to the Fordham GBA Student Marketing Society and is the academic director of both the Global Professional MBA Program and the recently announced Three-Continent Master of Global Management program.

Kabadayi joined the Fordham business faculty in 2005 after receiving his doctorate from Baruch College of the City University of New York. He will receive his awards on May 15 at the GBA Dean’s List and Awards Ceremony.

The center aims to promote the positive view of marketing shared by the business schools’ marketing faculty: “That it exists to help people,” said Luke Kachersky, Ph.D., assistant professor of marketing and the project coordinator for the center, which hopes to dispel the notion of marketing as a four-letter word.

“Marketing should deliver value,” Kachersky said, which can be broken down into two components—well-being and happiness.

By examining these notions, the research of CPM’s faculty and student fellows aims to shed light on how marketers can deliver greater value to, and receive greater value from, consumers. The center also plans to develop an index for measuring consumer value and well-being that can be used in industry and across cultures.

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Emotional measures are crucial to understanding value in a developed country like the United States, said Kachersky, where most people’s basic needs are met with ease. To that end, CPM will focus on marketers’ efforts to promote value through another feel-good concept—social responsibility.CPM’s undergraduate research fellow Robert Pigué, a senior in Fordham College at Rose Hill, found that people measure their happiness and success relative to the success of others. A key question for marketers then, he said, is “How do you make everyone feel better than those around them?”

Dawn Lerman, Ph.D., area chair of marketing and the center’s director, brought up the example of a recent attempt at eco-friendly packaging by SunChips. Despite this effort to make chip eaters feel good, the new bag was deemed too noisy and the company pulled it.

“Business gets criticized even when we try to do good,” Lerman said, adding that CPM should take charge in determining how all parties in the value exchange can do their part to make it mutually beneficial.

“This is a national conversation—the balance between profitability and well-being,” she said. “As a Jesuit business school, with the potential to influence future business leaders, we shouldn’t just be simply recipients of this conversation, or even just part of it. We should be leading it.”

The Center for Positive Marketing has been operating since its soft launch at the beginning of the spring semester. Lerman and Kachersky run the center, along with Marcia Flicker, Ph.D., associate professor of marketing, but as Lerman pointed out, it was conceived by all of the marketing faculty members—with their varied expertise—upon realizing that they shared a common goal: to put forth a positive view of an oft-maligned field.

Faculty will not be the only force behind the center. CPM is recruiting an executive in residence, a business leader who can bring cutting-edge practices to the classroom and connect students with opportunities in the business world. In addition to Pigué, the center also supports undergraduate research fellow Caitlin Zwick and graduate fellow Ann Bobel of the Graduate School of Business Administration.

“They are setting the foundation for us,” Kachersky said. Future fellows will collect primary data and be involved in one of the center’s most important projects: the index measuring consumer value and well-being.

If marketers want to deliver value, they need to have a formal way to measure consumers’ perception of value. “Intuitive understanding is not sufficient,” Kachersky said.

The index will be used to look at fluctuation in these perceptions over time, much like the consumer confidence index. Kachersky also views it as a tool to examine consumer value in other cultures where basic daily needs are not always met.

“And we can get brand specific,” he said, by approaching a company and helping it explore the success of a particular marketing campaign.

– Nicole LeRosa

The academy cited Kachersky for his teaching, use of technology in the classroom, and assessments of student learning based on recommendations from peers, students and administrators.

“Luke does not just teach his students in the sense of imparting knowledge,” said Dawn Lerman, Ph.D., associate professor and area chair of marketing. “He also seeks to reach them and to engage them in ways that will benefit their classroom learning but also serve them outside of the classroom.”

This is not the first accolade Kachersky has received for his teaching abilities. He was honored in 2010 with the Cura Personalis Award for challenging students while providing them support to excel. He also earned the Marketing Area Teaching Excellence Award for 2009.

Among his many—and perhaps less official, noteworthy achievements—Kachersky has won praise from his students for his approach to teaching marketing research. That staple of marketing programs is, said Lerman, “notoriously feared by students and one that yields lower than average evaluations, regardless of the instructor.”

Kachersky reverses the teaching progression so that students learn data analysis before research design, allowing them to understand and appreciate nuances of the entire research process. He also incorporates social media into his courses to provide students with an understanding of how such media provide market insights.

“Ours is a dynamic field, perhaps the most among all courses of study in higher education,” Kachersky said. “We, as marketing professors, are charged with an insurmountable task of making sense of a field that changes continuously. If we embrace the process and the burden of struggling with this task, we can deliver much value to our students, enabling them to confront similarly unresolvable issues in their lives and careers.”

In addition to his teaching load, Kachersky is a busy scholar with two papers scheduled for publication this year: “Do Moniker Maladies Afflict Name Letter Brands? A Dual Process Theory of Name Letter Branding and Avoidance Effects” in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology; and “The Role of Wireless Service Provider Trust on Consumer Acceptance of SMS Advertising,” co-authored with his Fordham colleague, Assistant Professor of Marketing Sertan Kabadayi, Ph.D., in the International Journal of Internet Marketing and Advertising.

Kachersky is also one of the driving forces, along with Lerman and Associate Professor of Marketing Marcia Flicker, Ph.D., behind Fordham’s newest research center, the Center for Positive Marketing. The center studies marketing from the demand (consumers’) as opposed to the supply (marketers’) perspective.

Kachersky joined the Fordham business faculty in 2008 after receiving his doctorate from Baruch College of the City University of New York. He will receive his award, and make a presentation on his classroom success, in May at the AMS Annual Conference in Coral Gables, Fla.

—Syd Steinhardt

Dawn Lerman, Ph.D., is studying how language can be used strategically to build brands.

An associate professor of marketing and chair of marketing in the Fordham business schools, Lerman is an expert on consumer behavior, communications with multicultural markets, consumer memory for brand names and the effect of language on consumer socialization and behavior.

With a colleague from Baruch College, she is working on a book about consumer linguistics, or using language strategically to build brands.

“It’s an area that’s really been understudied,” Lerman said. “If you think about marketing and communications, whether it be advertising or packaging or even the conversations a customer may have with a salesperson or another customer within a store, so much of communications depends on language.”

Whether it is the brand names they choose, the advertising copy, or even how salespeople speak to consumers, marketers put a lot of language out into the marketplace, Lerman said. These days, with software brands such as Joomla! and social media brands like Twitter and Tumblr, it would behoove marketers to understand the names they choose.

“The fact is, we know very little about the effect of language on consumers,” she added.

To find out, Lerman has investigated how consumers remember brand names and what types of brand names they remember.

“Some brand names are words in our language, like ‘Tide.’ But we also ‘FedEx’ things,” she said. “When a company comes out with a new brand, there are advantages to using names that are made of words that a consumer would find in the dictionary. There also are advantages to using a word that is entirely new.”

Consider the popular ice cream brand, Häagen-Dazs.

“When it came on the market, it really stood out because nothing looked like that,” Lerman said. “And we didn’t know how to pronounce it. Nothing sounded like that. The name violates English language rules.”

At the time, ice cream brand names were more mundane, such as Dolly Madison or even Breyers.

“Even if you had never seen it before, you knew how to pronounce Breyers,” Lerman said. “But Häagen-Dazs really stood out. And there’s a benefit to using something that’s truly novel, especially in consumer packaged goods where brands are merchandised side by side. The novel name really pops out. At the same time, the novelty can make the name hard for consumers to remember.”

Häagen-Dazs had staying power, thanks to its catchy name and, of course, to the product itself. When creating a brand, marketers must realize that sounds play a role, Lerman said. While most brand name research focuses on visual name processing, it’s just as important for marketers to understand auditory processing, particularly as many consumers are introduced to brands via word-of-mouth or radio advertising.

To examine the effect of brand spelling and how it influences memory, Lerman and her colleague conducted a series of experiments in which respondents were exposed to non-word brand names that were either relatively easy or relatively difficult to spell based on the sounds in the name.

“It is always quite an effort to come up with enough non-word brand names to draw conclusions, particularly when comparing language processing in different languages as I often do,” she said.

What they found was that a consumer’s attempt to spell an auditorily presented brand name and the spelling of the name itself can have a significant effect on consumer response, particularly the ability to recall the name.

Psycholinguistic research has highlighted two main routes to spelling:

Through the lexical (or direct) route, a “top-down” process occurs as individuals access the spelling of a word by retrieving its lexical representation from long-term memory. The sublexical route is used when a hearer encounters an unfamiliar word or a non-word. In this case, the lexical route will not reliably produce the intended spelling because, by definition, such stimuli lack an exact lexical representation.

In one study, subjects compared brands that can only be spelled one way (consistent), such as the word “tag,” versus brands that can be spelled in multiple ways (inconsistent), such as the fictitious name, Paugh, which can be spelled “palf,” “paff,” “paph” and “paugh.”

She found “consistent” brand names resulted in more accurate spelling of the name. Tag will likely be recalled by the consumer as “tag.”

“Inconsistent” brand names, on the other hand, curtail the sublexical route to spelling, so priming, or using a real word that sounds and is spelled like the non-word before the non-word, helps to offset that handicap. So the phony brand, Paugh, has a better chance of being recalled that way if the word “laugh” is presented beforehand.

“We typically think of ads, packaging, publicity and other types of promotions as the key tools for communicating a brand’s identity and developing its image. Even the language that is chosen for the ads or packaging, including the brand names themselves, represent relevant sources of information and can serve to differentiate a brand,” Lerman said.