The AMA-Irwin-McGraw-Hill Distinguished Marketing Educator Award honors living marketing educators for distinguished service and outstanding contributions in marketing education. All marketing educators who have made sustained contributions to marketing over an extended period of time are eligible.
The AMA Foundation is pleased to announce that John G. Lynch, Jr. has been selected as the 2025 AMA-Irwin-McGraw-Hill Distinguished Marketing Educator Award recipient!
John G. Lynch Jr. is University of Colorado Distinguished Professor at the Leeds School of Business, University of Colorado-Boulder. From 2022–2024, he served as Executive Director of Marketing Science Institute, a nonprofit think tank that bridges leaders in industry and academia to advance the science of marketing.
John received his BA in economics, his MA in psychology, and his PhD in psychology, all from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He was a member of the faculty at University of Florida from 1979–1996, where he was Graduate Research Professor. From 1996–2009 he was the Roy J. Bostock Professor of Marketing at the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University.
John was listed as the most admired active consumer researcher in the world in a survey of leading consumer research scholars reported in a 2024 article in the Journal of Consumer Research. John is a Fellow of the American Marketing Association, the Association for Consumer Research, the American Psychological Association/Society for Consumer Psychology, and one of six Fellows of all three organizations worldwide. He has been a recipient of the Paul D. Converse Award for Outstanding Contributions to the Science of Marketing and the Society for Consumer Psychology’s Distinguished Scientific Achievement Award.
Six of his papers have been honored as outstanding article of the year among various journals. He has been recognized once each by Journal of Marketing Research and by Journal of Marketing, and four times by Journal of Consumer Research for papers written in 1988, 1991, 2010, and 2015. He has served as president of the Journal of Consumer Research Policy Board, president of the Association for Consumer Research, associate editor for Journal of Consumer Research, and associate editor and co-editor for Journal of Consumer Psychology.
He was the founding Director of the Center for Research on Consumer Financial Decision Making and founding cochair of the Boulder Summer Conference on Consumer Financial Decision Making. He served on the Academic Research Council of the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau from 2017–2020.
An excerpt from John’s nomination letter for this award attests to his role as a beloved educator:
John is a dedicated teacher and mentor who has inspired and supported the development of students inside and outside the classroom throughout his career. At the University of Florida, he was “Outstanding Teacher of the Year” for the Marketing department (1991), “Teacher of the Year” for the College (1992), and received the TIP Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching (1993). At Duke University, he taught the most popular marketing elective, “Market Intelligence,” and he received the 2000 Bank of America Outstanding Faculty Award, a 2001 Business Week Outstanding Faculty designation, and Honorable Mention for the MBA Best Elective Teacher in 2001 and 2002. Many more junior scholars around the field have used his teaching materials.
At the University of Colorado, he was named the MBA Elective Teacher of the Year two of the three times he was eligible. At the PhD level, John has supervised or co-supervised 101 PhD dissertations over his career, and his former students are on the faculties of the world’s leading business schools, including Columbia, Stanford, Yale, INSEAD, USC, ULCA, and Vanderbilt, to name just a few. His students have won the John. A Howard / AMA Doctoral Dissertation Award (3 times) and won or received an honorable mention for the JCR Robert Ferber Award (9 times). His former students include three presidents of ACR or SCP. The AMA-Sheth Foundation Doctoral Consortium has also recognized John’s contributions to doctoral education by inviting him to serve as a consortium faculty member 19 times. As further testament to the impact of his mentorship of PhD students, the Association for Consumer Research recognized John as the inaugural winner of the Simonson Mentorship Award in 2023. In an important innovation for our field, John founded the three-campus Diverse Doctorates in Business program to serve as a local feeder to the PhD Project to help diverse students prepare for competitive application to business PhD programs. This program has resulted in a number of students entering PhD programs.John is a gifted mentor to all the students he works with as well as to the junior people he supports. He does so through his careful comments on papers and supportive actions to help them succeed in the profession. Many of us signing this letter have received support from John over the years and can attest to the difference it has made in our careers. A recent survey of editorial board members of JCR and JCP report John to be the most admired active consumer researcher in the world. We believe that a big part of that impact is that he has changed the professional lives of so many members of the field. One of John’s former students once said, “if John weren’t a marketing professor, he would likely be a priest,” which we take as a testament to John’s great capacity to share his support and knowledge as selfless acts of love.
John will be honored at the 2025 AMA Winter Academic conference in Phoenix, AZ.
Selected Publications
A few highlights of John’s research are below. View his full Google Scholar profile here.
Xinshu Zhao, John G. Lynch, Jr., Qimei Chen (2010), “Reconsidering Baron and Kenny: Myths and Truths About Mediation Analysis,” Journal of Consumer Research, 37 (2), 197–206.
Joseph Alba, John Lynch, Barton Weitz, Chris Janiszewski, Richard Lutz, Alan Sawyer, and Stacy Wood (1997), “Interactive Home Shopping: Consumer, Retailer, and Manufacturer Incentives to Participate in Electronic Marketplaces,” Journal of Marketing, 61 (3), 38–53.
Jack M. Feldman and John G. Lynch (1988), “Self-Generated Validity and Other Effects of Measurement on Belief, Attitude, Intention, and Behavior,” Journal of Applied Psychology, 73 (3), 421–35.
Daniel Fernandes, John G. Lynch Jr., and Richard G. Netemeyer (2014), “Financial Literacy, Financial Education, and Downstream Financial Behaviors,” Management Science, 60 (8), 1861–83.
Stephen A. Spiller, Gavan J. Fitzsimons, John G. Lynch Jr., and Gary H. Mcclelland (2013), “Spotlights, Floodlights, and the Magic Number Zero: Simple Effects Tests in Moderated Regression,” Journal of Marketing Research, 50 (2), 277–88.
John G. Lynch Jr. and Dan Ariely (2000), “Wine Online: Search Costs Affect Competition on Price, Quality, and Distribution,” Marketing Science, 19 (1), 83–103.
John G. Lynch Jr. and Thomas K. Srull (1982), “Memory and Attentional Factors in Consumer Choice: Concepts and Research Methods,” Journal of Consumer Research, 9 (1), 18–37.
John G. Lynch Jr. (1982), “On the External Validity of Experiments in Consumer Research,” Journal of Consumer Research, 9 (3), 225–39.
John G. Lynch Jr., Howard Marmorstein, and Michael F. Weigold (1988), “Choices from Sets Including Remembered Brands: Use of Recalled Attributes and Prior Overall Evaluations,” Journal of Consumer Research, 15 (2), 169–84.
Joseph W. Alba, J. Wesley Hutchinson, and John G. Lynch Jr. (1991), “Memory and Decision Making,” Handbook of Consumer Behavior, 1–49.