"This is not just an announcement [that I will be] president; it is about what I can do for them," said Keller, who is also the Charles Henry Jones Third Century Professor of Management at Tuck.
The Association is a global organization with approximately 1,700 members and serves consumers, firms, academics and policymakers. It functions primarily to connect members with scholarly research on consumer behavior and advance general performance.
Keller will be the first Dartmouth professor to hold a position this high in the Association: The position is likely the highest external service position that anyone from the marketing group at Tuck has had, according to Scott Neslin, the Albert Wesley Frey Professor of Marketing at Tuck.
"This is a tremendous honor, whose past presidents read like a who's who list of the field," Neslin said.
Keller said that one of her goals will be to promote and expand a division of marketing focused on social welfare called Transformative Consumer Research. A forerunner in this burgeoning field, she has studied and designed programs for issues such as alcohol consumption, childhood obesity, retirement savings, solar protection, and cancer screening tests.
"It is not like a company trying to convince you to buy a product," Keller said of Transformative Research.
Transformative marketing can be as simple as providing incentives for employees of a firm to lead healthier lifestyles or as ambitious as changing an entire community's behavior, Keller said.
Last year, grants for Transformative Researchers totaled about $15,000, an amount that Keller said she wants to see increase.
"I'm trying to come up with ways that other consumer researchers can work on projects that they are passionate about," she said.
Keller's ideas for broadening the scope of marketing research include advertising government grant opportunities to other researchers and increasing the visibility of Transformative Research in the marketing community. Dartmouth will co-host the first conference on Transformative Research with the Association and the Marketing Science Institute in July 2007.
"I think that this position is really a statement about the type of work that [Keller] does," Neslin said. "Her application of consumer behavior theories to communications that can be applied to improving society is really ratified by this position."
Keller will also teach the first Transformative Marketing elective course at Tuck this winter. In the course, which is open to both graduates and undergraduates, students will structure actual marketing program plans and pitch their ideas to guest panelists in the fields of fine arts, public health and government.
