Wright State professor Kunal Swani received prestigious research award from international marketing organization

Kunal Swani is a professor of marketing in the Raj Soin College of Business.

Kunal Swani, Ph.D., professor of marketing at Wright State University, and his research team won the prestigious William R. Darden Best Research Paper Methodology Award from the Academy of Marketing Science in May.

The William R. Darden Best Research Methodology Paper Award is awarded to an outstanding paper at the Academy of Marketing Science Annual Conference that includes rigorous application or advancement of methods or tools related to marketing research.

Their paper, “Brand Privacy Reputation (BPR): Conceptualization, Definition and Measurement,” was honored as an outstanding paper that includes rigorous application or advancement of methods or tools related to marketing research.

In the paper, Swani and his co-authors investigated the role that technology plays in consumer data privacy and the increasing importance for businesses to protect this data for consumer safety and to preserve brand reputation. To measure this, the research team introduced the concept of brand privacy reputation and developed a measurement scale for this new construct.

They proposed that businesses with a reputation for being proactive in protecting consumer data will have a competitive advantage over those the public perceives as being more passive.

Swani co-authored the paper with George Milne, associate dean of research, and Edward D. Shirley, endowed professor of marketing, at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Lauren Labrecque, Ph.D., professor of marketing at the University of Rhode Island, and Ereni Markos, Ph.D., associate professor of marketing at Suffolk University.

The Academy of Marketing Science is an international, scholarly, professional organization for marketing academics. The academy publishes the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science (JAMS), a top-rated journal within the marketing field.

Swani joined the Wright State Raj Soin College of Business in 2014. He teaches courses on marketing research, services marketing, and viral marketing and social media.

Swani received a Presidential Award for Faculty Excellence: Early Career Achievement in 2018 and an Outstanding Scholarly and Creative Activities Award in 2024 from Wright State. He was named to the Dayton Business Journal’s Forty Under 40 list in 2020.

He serves as associate editor of the Journal of Business Research and on the Editorial Board of Industrial Marketing Management and the Journal of Interactive Marketing.

Swani earned his Ph.D. in marketing from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, his MBA from Hofstra University and his bachelor’s degree in engineering from Pune University.