Prof. Dr. Jelena Spanjol (together with her coauthors) recognized with the 2025 AMA-EBSCO-RRBM Annual Award for Responsible Research in Marketing

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Prof. Dr. Jelena Spanjol (together with her coauthors) was recognized with the 2025 AMA-EBSCO-RRBM Annual Award for Responsible Research in Marketing for her research on consumer striving for wellbeing in expert services such as healthcare and personal finance.

The winning article, titled “Consumers on the Job: Contextualization Crafting in Expert Services”, was published 2021 in the Journal of Service Research. The AMA-EBSCO-RRBM Award honors outstanding research that produces both credible and useful knowledge that can be applied to benefit society. Research recognized by this award exemplifies the Seven Principles of Responsible Research which supports the general notion of “better marketing for a better world.”

Abstract: Tasked with a greater role in the coproduction of expert services, consumers often face an immense burden in coproducing service and well-being outcomes. While some prior research has explored customer work, we delineate unique aspects of expert services and articulate consumer efforts that transpire outside the dyadic service interaction. Through netnographic inquiry in a health care context, we find that coproduction efforts are job-like and require job crafting efforts. Upon this foundation, three major themes emerged: (1) consumers leverage their context expertise by adapting content expertise to their unique circumstances, (2) consumers develop and deploy strategies (hacks) through affordances in order to manage their coproduction jobs, and (3) consumers move through the expert service journey in a variety of ways that shift them toward or away from well-being outcomes. After assessing the transferability of our results by analyzing a second expert service context (financial services/debt management), we suggest implications for theory, practice, and future research.

Read the full article here.