On November 15th, 2019 we had the opportunity to host Professor Russell W. Belk, currently professor of Marketing at Schulich School of Business, York University and Kraft Foods Canada Chair in Marketing, during our Annual Research Storm.
His areas of expertise are: International Business; Marketing; Responsible Business. He is a leading authority on Advertising and Promotion; Branding; Consumer Behavior; Consumer Culture Theory; Globalism; Market System Dynamics; Marketing Research; Qualitative Methods. His research involves the meanings of possessions, collecting, gift-giving, sharing, and materialism.This work is often cultural, visual, qualitative, and interpretive. By understanding what our possessions mean to us after we acquire them, how different cultures, past and present, regard consumption, and how we relate to each other through possessions, it is his belief that we learn something more profound and practical than simply asking how we evaluate alternative marketplace offerings. In a consumer society, our ideas about ourselves are often bound up or represented in what we desire, what we own, and how we use these things.
He is the co-founder of the Association for Consumer Research Film Festival and has over 550 publications. He is currently on the editorial boards of 20 journals and is Associate Editor of the Journal of Consumer Research. He is past president of the Association for Consumer Research and the International Association of Marketing and Development, and is a fellow in the Association for Consumer Research and the American Psychological Association.
He has won the Outstanding Reviewer Award multiple times. In 2017, he received the Emerald Citation of Excellence and the Royal Society of Canada Fellow, one of the highest awards that can be awarded to researchers in Canada (an award granted to individuals that the Royal Society of Canada judges to have “made remarkable contributions in the arts, the humanities and the sciences, as well as in Canadian public life”).
He has received the Paul D. Converse Award, two Fulbright Fellowships, Society of Marketing Advances Distinguished Marketing Scholar Award, and several honorary professorships. In 2005 he received the Sheth Foundation/Journal of Consumer Research Award for Long Term Contribution to Consumer Research.
Besides York, he has also taught at the University of Utah, University of Illinois, Temple University, Claremont Graduate University, and universities in Eastern and Western Europe, Asia, Africa, New Zealand, and Australia.
Some of his notable papers include "Possessions and the Extended Self", "The Sacred and the Profane in Consumer Behavior: Theodicy on the Odyssey", "Materialism: Trait aspects of living in the material world", "The Fire of Desire", "The Cult of Macintosh", "Sharing", "Extended Self in a Digital World" among many others.
The materials of Prof. Belk's Inspirational Speech, held at X.ITE Research Storm 2019, are available here: Smart Objects Role in Consumers' Life
Prof. Belk at X.ITE Research Storm 2019 - November, 15th 2019 @ LUISS University, Rome
