“Who here loves Sonya?” asked Kogod School of Business dean David Marchick, addressing a crowd in the Katzen Arts Center’s Abramson Recital Hall. The room filled with cheers; after all, the audience had gathered to celebrate the career and achievements of marketing professor Sonya Grier. In front of family, friends, students, and colleagues, Grier was formally installed as the Arlene R. and Robert P. Kogod Eminent Scholar Chair in Marketing, a distinction that both honors her contributions to the field and provides funding for her continued research.
The endowed chair was made possible by a sizeable gift from the Kogod family, establishing three new chairs for the school’s faculty. Professor Valentina Bruno was named the Eminent Scholar Chair in finance and will be honored with an event next semester, while the search for an Eminent Scholar Chair in sustainability remains ongoing.
An endowed chair is considered one of the highest academic honors a faculty member can achieve; it signifies the chairholder’s achievements to date and establishes financial support for them to pursue future goals.
With this new set of resources, Grier will continue her critical work studying the relationship between race and the marketplace—research she’s been spearheading since she was a student herself. When she pursued her master’s degree and PhD at Northwestern University, the notion of researching race in marketing was still considered radical, and Grier recalled being advised not to conduct such research. She ignored that advice, instead writing about race in every paper, studying it in every assignment, and focusing on it in her dissertation. Even before she began her scholarly research, Grier had seen firsthand how Black consumers face unique issues, from increased surveillance to higher prices and discrimination. Grier believed that to avoid properly discussing those issues is to tell an incomplete story of the marketing world.
Grier’s determination to conduct this research led her to become one of the foremost—if not the foremost—experts on race in the marketplace worldwide. As of this year, she has won the Thomas C. Kinnear Award for significant contributions to marketing and public policy five times, more than any other marketing scholar since the award was established in 1993. As fellow marketing professor Khalia Jenkins said in the event’s introductory video, Grier quite literally wrote the book on race in the marketplace—which is available in open access and covers sociopolitical issues in global marketing. Grier cofounded the Race in the Marketplace network for like-minded researchers to collaborate, opening even more doors for those looking to study these issues.
In his opening remarks at the recent installation, Dean Marchick said that when he announced the event, he received fifty personal notes about Grier’s impact from her colleagues and students, both past and present.