Marketing graduate student wins national research award

Bige Saatcioglu, a doctoral candidate in marketing in the Pamplin College of Business, has won the American Marketing Association's (AMA) marketing and public policy dissertation competition this year.

Her dissertation proposal, “The Practices of Consumer Resistance Among the Working Poor,” received the 2009 Marketing and Society Award. She will present her dissertation at the AMA Marketing and Public Policy Conference in May.

“My research explores the consumption practices of low-income consumers and their acculturation strategies into a marketplace dominated by stereotypes about the poor,” says Saatcioglu. She expects her research will reveal “a wide range of coping and appropriation strategies that low-income consumers employ to get their needs served in the marketplace.” Her research includes an ethnographic study of trailer-park residents. She hopes that her work will be useful for public policy making, she says, given the crisis in affordable housing and increasing financial uncertainties for low-income consumers.

Saatcioglu, who is from Istanbul, Turkey, has accepted a faculty position at the HEC School of Management in Paris and will start teaching there in September. Last fall, she received the ACR/Sheth Foundation Dissertation Grant from the Association for Consumer Research and the Sheth Foundation as a second-place winner in the public purpose category. Saatcioglu has also been selected to receive the Pamplin College’s 2009 Outstanding Graduate Student Award for her scholarly accomplishments.