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National Recognition

Congratulations to Kelly B. Herd, of the Class of 2003, who has won a national prize for her Ph.D. dissertation in marketing.

Kelly will complete her degree at the University of Colorado’s Leeds School of Business next May and is set to join the faculty at Indiana University. She won honors in business administration at W&L.

Kelly’s dissertation, “Identity Representation in Customization,” won the Alden G. Clayton Dissertation Proposal Competition of the Marketing Science Institute. Her research focuses on customers’ ability to customize products and the implications for firms that offer such customization.

Earlier this year, the results of studies that Kelly conducted, with associate professor C. Page Moreau, were published in the Journal of Consumer Research. “To Each His Own? How Comparisons with Others Influence Consumers’ Evaluations of Their Self-Designed Products” created a buzz in the marketing press. The studies examined the way in which consumers are becoming the designers of their own products and the way that they compare their work with that of the professional designers. One of their studies looked at the way consumers approached creating their own “skins” for MP3 players at a website. It found that they enjoyed competing against professional designers, suggesting a way for firms to increase the interaction of consumers with their products.

Kelly started her program at Colorado after working at Brodeur Worldwide, in Boston, and at New Media Strategies, in Arlington, Va.

If you know any W&L alumni who would be great profile subjects, tell us about them! Nominate them for a web profile.