Scholar scoops Sidney J. Levy award

A Lecturer in Marketing from Cardiff Business School has received a prestigious award at the 2018 Consumer Culture Theory Conference in Odense, Denmark.

Dr Rebecca Scott picked up the Sidney J. Levy Award at the University of Southern Denmark for her paper, entitled ‘Selling Pain to the Saturated Self’, which was published in the Journal of Consumer Research, in July 2017.

The research, in collaboration with colleagues Assistant Professor Julien Cayla at Nanyang Technological University and Professor Bernard Cova at Kedge Business School set about trying to understand why people pay for an experience that is deliberately marketed as painful.

They discovered that pain helps individuals deal with the physical inactivity of office life, bringing the body into sharp focus and allowing participants who spend much of their time sitting in front of computers, to rediscover the nature of their body.

The Sidney J. Levy Award competition is held annually in honour of one of the founding fathers of Consumer Culture Theory.

The award is given to the best Consumer Culture Theory-oriented dissertation article published in the preceding year.

Read ‘Selling Pain to the Saturated Self’, here.

Befitting of its host city, Odense, the 2018 conference theme was consumer culture fairytales. The city’s name means the sanctuary of Odin, a central figure in Norse mythology.

Full details of the conference programme can be found on the University of Southern Denmark website.