UC Marketing Professor Wins Research Competition

Mary Steffel, assistant marketing professor in the Carl H. Lindner College of Business, is among 22 outstanding submissions selected as 2014 winners of the

Marketing Science Institute

research competition on "Social Interactions and Social Media Marketing." 

Steffel and co-author Elanor F. Williams, a postdoctoral scholar of marketing at the Rady School of Management at the University of California San Diego, were selected as winners for their upcoming research project: "Does Sharing Signal Caring? Asymmetric Interpretations of the Informativeness of Own and Others’ Social Media Communications." 

The research focuses on examining how well people believe their social media profiles reflect their true preferences, whether or not others believe it reflects the user, and the implications this has on social networks and the marketers who utilize them. 

As winners, the pair will receive a $5,000 grant from the Marketing Science Institute to help support their work in understanding these relationships. 

Steffel and Williams recently collaborated on another award-winning research project sponsored by the Georgetown Institute for Consumer Research at the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University.