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The Association for Consumer Research (ACR) gave Hunter Jones the Franco Nicosia Award for the Best Competitive Paper at its annual conference in October. The winning paper, “The Silver Lining to the Mushroom Cloud: A Netnographic Analysis of Consumers Enjoying Systemic and Existential Risks”, was selected from a pool of 239 papers presented at the conference (from a submission pool of 444). The winner was selected by the conference chairs based on evaluations from multiple reviewers who considered this to be exceptional work with the possibility to make a meaningful influence on the discipline.

Hunter Jones, who is a doctoral student at the Department of Marketing, is delighted to receive recognition for his hard work.

‘In academia, you often go long stretches of time without any recognition for your day-to-day research so it’s really nice and motivating when you get some attention. With ACR out of the way, I’m now very much looking forward to pushing this paper through the peer review process at the Journal of Consumer Research with my supervisor and co-author Dr. Eric Arnould’, he explained.

‘To theorize how consumers process systemic and existential risks to market society, my netnography adopts a psycho-social perspective to study doomsday preppers, consumers preparing for the collapse or breakdown of society. In doing so, it demonstrates how the concept of ‘Jouissance’, enjoyment, explicates consumers’ orientation towards doomsday risks.’

According to Rajiv Vaidyanathan, Executive Director of ACR and Professor of Marketing at the University of Minnesota Duluth, ACR is an extremely competitive conference.

‘The Nicosia Award goes to a paper that several reviewers believe has the potential for significant scholarly impact’, he said.  

The Franco Nicosia Award was established in 1998 in honor of Professor Franco Nicosia of the University of California, Berkeley. It is funded by the Sheth Foundation and is presented to the author/s of the best competitive paper presented at the ACR conference.