Dr. Joris Drayer had a week to remember.
The Associate Professor at the School of Tourism and Hospitality Management earned two research accolades during the 12th annual Conference of the Sport Marketing Association (SMA), for which he also served as conference director.
Drayer co-authored the conference’s Best Paper Award recipient. The research paper, titled, “Developing and Validating an Emotional Attachment to Sport Team Scale,” was chosen from a field of 162 submissions. Drayer co-authored the paper with: Brendan Dwyer, Greg Greenhalgh and Carrie LeCrom, of Virginia Commonwealth University; and Michael Mudrick, of the University of Connecticut.
This marks the third time in five years that Drayer has won the conference’s Best Paper Award.
Additionally, Drayer was named a SMA Research Fellow. The distinction recognizes outstanding contributions to sport marketing research, as measured through articles published in SMA’s journal, Sport Marketing Quarterly and through presentations at the organization’s national conference.
Dr. Daniel Funk, a fellow STHM professor, was named a SMA Research Fellow at the 2013 SMA conference. Funk and Drayer are two of only 11 people nationally to have attained this distinction.
“The majority of my research in sport marketing relates to pricing,” Drayer said. “I’ve worked hard to help organizations better understand their price-setting strategies and also to understand how consumers respond to these strategies and other price related issues.”
“Acknowledgements such as these give people an opportunity to step back and look at the whole body of their work,” Drayer continued. “For me, it was exciting to see that I really had a story to tell with my research. It was also fun to share this with so many people, many of whom attended the conference and with whom I have collaborated over the years.”
STHM also fielded a student team that earned honorable-mention honors in the conference’s Case Cup competition. The competition gives teams 24 hours to use real practices and innovative research to find a solution to an industry-based problem before delivering a 15-minute presentation to a judging panel. STHM’s team featured Megan Fry, Derek Kemmerer, Kenny Yansen and Daniel Altomare.
Other awards conferred at the conference included:
- Best Student Paper: “The Sponsorship Secret Nobody Tells: Purchase Intentions Versus Actual Purchases,” by Noni Zaharia, University of Northern Colorado, with advisors David Stotlar and Dianna Gray, University of Northern Colorado.
- SMA Research Fellow Awards: Nancy Lough, University of Northern Colorado; Brenda Pitts, Georgia State University; James Zhang, University of Florida; and Drayer, Temple University.
- Best Major League Soccer National Sales Center Ignite Presentation: Thilo Kunkel, Temple University.
- Sutton Award: Chad McEvoy, Syracuse University.
- Stotlar Award: Lynn Kahle, University of Oregon.