UWs Peterson Receives Top Award from International Macromarketing Society

Mark Peterson, a University of Wyoming professor of marketing and sustainable business practices, is a recipient of the Macromarketing Society’s Shelby D. Hunt Award.

The award is given annually to the author whose article in the Journal of Macromarketing has received the most citations by authors of other published research articles over the past five years.

Peterson received the award at the international society’s annual meeting, which took place earlier this month in Leipzig, Germany.

The Macromarketing Society promotes research on how marketing and society affect each other. Its membership includes hundreds of researchers from marketing and related fields, such as consumer science and public policy. 

Macromarketing Society President Cliff Shultz, of Loyola University Chicago, terms the Hunt Award as the “most prestigious” in the subdiscipline of macromarketing. An early developer of macromarketing, Hunt is a professor of marketing at Texas Tech University. He is known as the most prolific researcher in the field of marketing.

Peterson is the second author of the winning article, “Understanding the Attitude-Behavior Gap for Renewable Energy Systems Using Behavioral Reasoning Theory.” His co-authors are Marius Claudy, of University College Dublin, and Aidan O’Driscoll, of the Dublin Institute of Technology. 

Using survey data from 254 Irish homeowners, the study presented evidence that reasons against installing solar panels on homes have a negative influence on intentions to adopt solar panels. Such reasons against adoption usually counteract the effect of consumers’ attitudes toward solar panels on their intentions to adopt such solar panels. This insight explains why more adoption of green technologies by consumers has not occurred even though consumers report having favorable attitudes for green technologies, such as solar panels.

In 2013, SAGE Publications published Peterson’s book, “Sustainable Enterprise: A Macromarketing Approach,” which features sustainability and renewable energy concepts prominently.

Peterson received his Ph.D. in marketing from Georgia Tech in 1994 and joined the UW faculty in 2007.