Impact Makers
Impact Makers
Faculty Spotlight
Professor Hastak and Professor Mitra:
Skepticism of Advertising and Consumer Healthfulness
In their recent article published in the Journal of Consumer Affairs, Professors Hastak, Mitra, and Debra Ringold (Willamette University) examine consumers' use of the Nutrition Facts Panel (NFP) to determine whether consumers actually use the labels or only report doing so. They find few consumers examine NFPs for healthfulness, but those who are often more skeptical of advertising or find health-related information more important than the average consumer.
Professor Hastak has published extensively in scholarly marketing publications including the Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Public Policy Marketing, Journal of Advertising, Journal of Business Research, and Psychology Marketing. He currently serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Public Policy Marketing.
Professor Mitra’s research focuses on consumer perceptions of marketing information such as advertising, nutritional labeling, and other mandatory disclosures and their public policy implications. She has published scholarly articles in the Journal of Consumer Research, International Journal of Research in Marketing, Journal of Public Policy and Marketing, Marketing Letters, and Journal of Business Research.
Alumni Spotlight
Joshua Lin, MS in Marketing, 2021:
Multiplicity in Marketing
Joshua's work focuses on the impact he can make in greater society through the execution of socially responsible small business marketing. Joshua stresses the importance of understanding the multiplicity of one's actions:
"There is a multiplicity to our actions and that is to everything, but especially marketing. The biggest issue in modern marketing is that the ‘impact makers’—the marketers—don’t recognize their responsibility.
I work with small businesses because I love the intimacy of value creation in a smaller setting. When you create value for a segment, socially responsible marketers must work to understand the ways they are creating value for everyone that extends beyond that segment as well. When you are creating value for your clients or shareholders, you are also creating value for everyone they interact with beyond that. At its core, marketing helps individuals shape their understanding of self and, from that point, multiplicity. If marketers thought of each action in terms of impact, I don’t believe we would see such a negative detriment on consumer well-being.”