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Stacy Wood Wins Mungo Undergraduate Teaching Award

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Dr. Stacy L. Wood, Moore Research Fellow and associate professor of marketing, has received a 2006-2007 Michael J. Mungo Undergraduate Teaching Award. The campus-wide award, which recognizes excellence in undergraduate teaching on the Columbia campus, was announced May 2.  
   
The award carries with it a $2,500 cash prize. It is named after Michael J. Mungo, a 1950 University of South Carolina graduate who is also a USC trustee and a local real estate developer.
   
Wood, a nationally recognized researcher in consumer behavior, is the fourth Moore School faculty member to win a Mungo Undergraduate Teaching Award. Dr. William O. Bearden won the award in 1999-2000, Dr. Helen I. Doerpinghaus in 1993-1994, and Dr. Steven V. Mann in 1992-1993.
  
Dean Joel A. Smith III lauded Wood for her “outstanding accomplishment.” She is “an engaging and dynamic teacher, and an excellent role model for female professionals,” he added. “We are proud to have her as a member of our faculty.”
   
Wood joined the USC faculty in 1998 after earning her Ph.D. at the University of Florida’s top-ranked consumer behavior program. Her research in consumer behavior has been honored with the 1997 MSI/H. Paul Root Award (for the best paper in the Journal of Marketing) and the 2005 Louis W. Stern Award (for the best paper on marketing channels).
   
In 2004, Wood was invited to be a visiting faculty member at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she taught graduate seminars in consumer behavior and branding.
   
In 2005, Wood was named a MSI Young Scholar by the Marketing Science Institute and was named to the editorial review board for the Journal of Consumer Research, the field’s top journal.
   
In 2006, Wood served as an affiliated faculty member at M.I.T.’s Convergence Culture Consortium, a program designed to spearhead and disseminate research on innovations in technology-driven media and marketing interactions.

Wood’s research focuses on consumer innovation and the adoption of new products. She examines consumers’ motivation to change and the methods consumers use to learn about and ultimately adopt new products.

Her interests in consumer change behavior are broad and include social or marketplace change (e.g., use of new media/channels such as e-commerce, adoption of new trends such as reality TV) and individual change (e.g., the consumers’ ability to predict their future happiness, the role of challenge, and hurdles in motivating change).
 
Wood believes that knowledge of consumer psychology is important for everyone. “So much of our life involves a consumption decision of some kind,” she says—“how to spend our money, our time, our efforts. We can maximize those ‘spending’ decisions when we better understand the basic theories of consumer behavior. For example, the compromise effect [our tendency to choose the middle option when presented with an array of choices] influences the health insurance plan we choose, the soda size we buy at the movies, the fuel economy we expect in our cars, and even the damages awarded by a jury in a court case. When we understand these influences, we make smarter consumer choices ourselves. And, more broadly, we see how they impact the decisions of our customers and our society.”
 
Wood’s research has been published in international top-tier journals including the Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, and Journal of Consumer Psychology.

She brings innovation into the classroom, where she teaches courses on consumer behavior, branding, new product design, and professional selling. Students say they appreciate her enthusiasm, knowledge, and emphasis on engaged learning.  Wood uses a variety of in-class exercises, case studies, role-playing activities, and research techniques to teach students how to apply abstract theories to solve concrete problems.

In their course evaluations, students often describe Wood as their favorite professor at Carolina, as a role model for female professionals, and as someone who really cared about them and their careers. As one student wrote, “Dr. Wood has influenced my life more than any other professor since my arrival at USC.”
 
Wood is also director of the Marketing Scholars Program at Moore, an innovative course in which 12 undergraduate marketing majors form a working marketing agency with a real client, real deadlines, and a real $2,500 budget. 

Wood was the 2001 winner of the Moore School’s Alfred G. Smith, Jr. Excellence in Teaching Award and has frequently been awarded the Excellence in Teaching Award from the Alpha Chapter of USC’s Mortar Board Society, most recently in 2006-2007.