Matthew Abel congratulates Professor Malcolm Wright.
Professor Malcolm Wright has been appointed to the MSA Charitable Trust Chair in Marketing, one of two endowed chairs at the Massey Business School funded by business consultant, philanthropist and Massey University alumnus Matthew Abel.
Massey Business School Pro Vice-Chancellor Professor Stephen Kelly says Professor Wright was selected for the position because he is a world-class scholar.
“Malcolm is one of the most prolific marketing professors in Australasia who excels in publishing, service, grants, and the advising of new academics,” he says. “In his career he has published more than 50 peer-reviewed articles with over 20 in high-ranked marketing journals, and made numerous contributions to books, including authorship of the multi-edition textbook Consumer Behaviour: Applications in Marketing.
“He has also worked actively with Massey University in a variety of roles, including head of school, dean academic, and deputy pro vice-chancellor. Malcolm has spent 25 years teaching students about all aspects of marketing and supervised numerous doctoral students.”
Donation allows investment in people
Professor Kelly says he is grateful to Mr Abel for his donation to the Massey Business School as it allows the school to invest in its people.
“Academics of Malcolm’s calibre make a huge contribution to programme development, as well as teaching and mentoring students and colleagues. It’s in our best interests to keep them in New Zealand and the MSA Charitable Trust Chair makes this possible.”
Professor Wright says the MSA Chair means an enormous amount to him.
“It is a huge privilege to have been granted this honour. It will also really help my work as it signals to others the value of the projects I have been involved with,” he says. “This will help me to amplify that work and extend its application further into the marketing community.”
Over his 25-year academic career, Professor Wright has focused on evidence-based marketing, brand loyalty, new product adoption and product growth rates. His current research focus is on how information processing and memory affect consumer choice, and in particular how consumers use intuitive and deliberative thinking to process brands, concepts and environments.
“My work includes a team of PhD students looking at aspects of this problem in areas as diverse as fairtrade labelling, climate engineering techniques, peripheral attention to tweets, and virtual reality shopping,” he says.
He also engages with the broader marketing community through media commentary, as the chair of the Australian Advisory Board for the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science and as a director of Consumer Insights Ltd, a Massey University spin-out company focused on market research.
Mr Abel has been a long-time supporter of Massey University and his MSA Charitable Trust aims to support Massey Business School chairs until 2040. Each year the trust makes a donation to the Massey University Foundation, part of which is endowed in order to fund chairs in marketing and finance for the next 21 years.