By David Dodson
ddodson@terry.uga.edu
Tucked away in Brooks Hall, toward the back of the building near the auditorium, you’ll find it in the marketing department—the best little degree program in Terry.
The Master of Marketing Research program was the first of its kind when the Terry College of Business established it in 1980 at the request of industry professionals, and it remains the nation’s foremost graduate program for market researchers anywhere.
The M.M.R. program is kept small, currently enrolling about 25 students a year and possibly growing to as many as 40. But as marketing professor Tom Leigh knows from his four years as director of the program, it carries a big name with the powers-that-be in the field of marketing research.
“We pretty much established the category,” says Leigh, speaking the language of brand managers. “And part of our charge is to help other universities form similar programs. We’ve helped four others schools do that.”
The number of M.M.R. graduates from Terry now exceeds 300, and to mark the 20th anniversary of the program’s creation a large contingent of M.M.R. alumni gathered for a reunion Nov. 16–18.
The reunion featured a full day of speakers on marketing research topics at Coca-Cola’s headquarters in Atlanta, followed by a dinner and dance and a very soggy tailgate party before the Ole Miss game. But the rains didn’t dampen the spirits of the M.M.R. fraternity; the reunion drew about 150 alumni and M.M.R. advisory board members.
“Our alumni are scattered at more than 100 companies across the country, but we had all 20 classes represented,” Leigh says. “The esprit de corps they showed was just amazing.”
The reunion was also a farewell of sorts for Leigh, who relinquished his role as director of the Coca-Cola Center for Marketing Studies, which administers the M.M.R. program, after being named the Terry College’s first holder of the Emily H. and Charles M. Tanner Jr. Chair in Sales Management.
Leigh will still be actively involved with the M.M.R. program, but his selection to the Tanner Chair—which was created by the family of a 1916 UGA business graduate who co-founded Florida Furniture Industries—will refocus Leigh’s efforts toward a broader research program in sales management, he says.
“The Tanner family wants the chairholder to conduct research in sales, sales management and ethical selling,” Leigh says, “with the goal being leading-edge research worthy of the best academic journals and relevant to the practice of business. ”
Guided partly by his research agenda, Leigh’s teaching responsibilities have followed a path that began in advertising and marketing communications at Indiana University and Penn State and veered into sales management and marketing strategy after arriving at UGA in 1987.
Continuing the evolution, he recently adapted a graduate course to reflect the “current buzz” about customer-relationship management and business-to-business e-commerce.
“My career really shifted to sales-management research from the advertising side when I came here,” he says. “Today, those two areas are kind of merging because they’ve been brought together by the Internet and this concept of customer-relationship management.
“For example, ads appear on the Internet, customer relationships are built through the Internet, marketing data is collected on the use of the Internet, and salespeople use the Internet,” Leigh also says. “So, now all that research is more focused on the total relationship businesses have with their customers, whether it’s advertising, or products, or brands, or salespeople.” |
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