UNC Kenan-Flagler marketing professor Valarie Zeithaml won the prestigious 2008 Paul D. Converse Award from the American Marketing Association. The Paul D. Converse Award is granted every four years to one or more persons who have made outstanding contributions to marketing scholarship.
Zeithaml, the David S. Van Pelt Family Distinguished Professor of Marketing, is the first woman to ever win the Converse award. She was recognized for her work on service quality, specifically for two articles:
- "A Conceptual Model of Service Quality and Its Implications for Future Research," Journal of Marketing
- "SERVQUAL: A Multiple-Item Scale for Measuring Service Quality," Journal of Retailing
The award acknowledges enduring contributions to marketing through one or more journal articles, books or a body of work. No contribution is considered until five years after it is made available to marketing academics and/or practitioners, through publication or other means. A jury of scholars from university, business and government makes the selection of award recipients, first by nominating the work for consideration, and then rating the contributions.
The Converse awards will be presented in April 2008 at the College of Business at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign during a weekend-long symposium, which includes presentations by the winners and a discussion of each winner’s contribution to be led by a discussant of the winner’s choice.