Georgia Tech Scheller College of Business faculty member Tim Halloran, senior lecturer in Marketing and faculty director of the Executive MBA program, along with colleague Richard J. Lutz, University of Florida, Warrington College of Business, was recently awarded “Best Paper of 2021” for “Let’s Give Them Something to Talk About: Which Media Engagements Predict Purchase Frequency?” published in The Journal of Interactive Marketing (JIM), November 2021.
Due to the journal’s transition to the American Marketing Association (AMA) in 2022, the announcement was delayed until 2023.
“The paper came out of my dissertation for my doctorate at the University of Florida. With the help of my doctoral advisor, Richard Lutz, at the University of Florida, I recrafted my dissertation as an academic paper and then went down the long, long road of the academic publishing process. When it was finally published, it was like a huge weight had been lifted off my shoulders. I thought that was the end of it until the Journal of Interactive Marketing wrote us telling us we had won the paper of the year. It was very rewarding knowing how much work had gone into this, and I have a lot of people to thank for helping us get there, starting with Professor Lutz,” said Halloran.
According to Halloran, the article looks at trying to understand better how consumers engage with brands in the social media space and if that can predict increases in sales frequency. Using a casual restaurant as their test case, they discovered that the number of “likes” a company receives on social media doesn’t increase visits, but a “love” emoji or, more importantly, a positive comment was more likely to bring in customers to the restaurant.
“What impressed us most about the paper by Halloran and Lutz is that despite so many published papers on the effects of social media in marketing, this is among the very few studies that exploited individual-level data to assess behavioral outcomes associated with social media use by consumers,” cited the award committee.
The criteria for the award include that faculty must make “a significant contribution to the advancement of the practice of marketing.” The recipients are selected by a vote of the association’s members, including editorial board members, associate editors, and advisory board members. Once these votes have been counted, a smaller committee finalizes the winner.
The article will be recognized this summer at the American Marketing Association Summer Academic Conference.
