Presidential Award for Faculty Excellence: Early Career Achievement

Kunal Swani

Kunal Swani, a newly appointed associate professor of marketing, received the 2018 Presidential Award for Faculty Excellence: Early Career Achievement for his effective teaching and distinguished research.

Swani is an editorial board member for both the Journal of Marketing Analytics and Industrial Marketing Management, which is rated A* by the Australian Business Deans Council, the highest quality category and only given to 5 to 7 percent of journals. He has also served as a guest editor for a special issue on B2B advertising for Industrial Marketing Management. All these roles are very rare for someone at such an early stage in his career.

Swani published five journal articles, one book chapter and a conference paper, all within the span of one year, and has published a total of 13 peer-reviewed journal articles. He also has three other articles in revision.

Elsevier Publishing ranked Swani’s article in Industrial Marketing Management as one of the Top 10 most downloaded economic articles since January 2014. His paper in the Journal of Research in Interactive Marketing was selected by Emerald Publishing as an “Emerald Gem” and appears in the book “New Perspectives in Marketing by Word-of-Mouth” based on being highly read and cited.

Swani is also a very effective teacher. He incorporates experiential learning in his courses and has built productive links to Dayton business, nonprofit and government communities.

Thomas Traynor, interim dean of the Raj Soin College of Business, described Swani as a technology innovator who has offered a redesigned course on marketing research online.

“Marketing is a fast-changing field, with the concepts and tools of today bearing little resemblance to those of just a few years ago,” Traynor said. “Swani meets that challenge through his passion and commitment to incorporating cutting-edge concepts and technologies into his teaching.”

Student evaluations of Swani’s six different courses from 2015 to 2017 have been very positive. Swani has developed a new course, Viral Marketing and Social Media, which explores how businesses plan and execute viral marketing campaigns, using social media to understand customer motivations and capitalizing on their behavior. He has also been recently appointed to the board of trustees for Muse Machine, a local nonprofit arts education organization.