Professor Katherine White honoured with American Marketing Association’s 2024 William L. Wilkie “Marketing for a Better World” Award

During a ceremony at the American Marketing Association’s 2024 Winter Academic Conference, February 23-25, 2024 in St. Pete Beach, Florida, UBC Sauder’s Dr. Katherine White was presented with the prestigious 2024 William L. Wilkie “Marketing for a Better World” Award.

The William L. Wilkie “Marketing for a Better World” honours marketing thinkers who have significantly contributed to our understanding and appreciation for marketing’s potential to improve our world, and from whose work notable advances have ensued—in the mold of Bill Wilkie of the University of Notre Dame.

“I’m extremely pleased that the committee selected Katherine White as the 2024 winner of this award,” Bill Wilkie says. “I have marveled at the broad range of the field that she has taken on with incisive research aimed at shaping marketing thought and practice toward expanding positive marketing impacts on our world. Congratulations to this fine marketing scholar.”

In selecting Dr. White for this award, the AMA highlighted a number of Dr. White’s notable achievements: 

• She has contributed over 50 peer-reviewed publications, with an h-index of 43.
• Her 2019 Journal of Marketing article, “How to SHIFT Consumer Behaviors to be more Sustainable: A Literature Review and Guiding Framework,” has already has been cited over 1,400 times, and is the single most viewed and downloaded article from the Journal of Marketing in the last 30 years.
• A summary of this research for practitioners, “The Elusive Green Consumer,” published in Harvard Business Review, has also been impactful (372 citations to date).
• She has also published pioneering experimental work in Journal of Marketing Research (recycling and composting) and Journal of Marketing (grasscyling and composting).
• Through her role as Academic Chair of the Peter P. Dhillon Centre for Business Ethics, she has been instrumental in fostering collaboration and dialogue between academia, industry, and government, and bridging the gap between research and practice.
• She cofounded the Decision Insights for Business and Society (DIBS) research group, through which she has conducted many “behavior change for good” research projects with local government agencies and trained government and industry workers in the Behavioural Insights certificate program that she co-created. She has also created and organized the bi-annual Behavioural Insights into Business for Social Good (BIBSG) conference, the fourth instance of which will occur in 2024, bringing together academics and industry working on research for social good.
• As the first Senior Associate Dean of Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Sustainability at UBC Sauder, Dr. White works to improve the well-being and sense of inclusion of all underrepresented communities, including a specific focus on Indigenous communities—a particularly important topic in British Columbia.

“I think that now, more than ever, marketing academics are asking thoughtful questions with practical relevance and the potential to have real societal impact,” says Dr. White. “I enjoy the challenge of thinking about how we can apply theory in creative ways that can impact actual business practice and public policy. I am deeply appreciative and humbled to receive this award, particularly in association with the path-breaking work that Bill Wilkie has done in this domain.”