Luke Kachersky, Ph.D., said he can predict your response if he knows your Persuasion Tactic Pricing Knowledge (PTPK) level.

If your PTPK level is high, then you will be thoroughly annoyed. If it is low, then you will probably shrug off the change.

Kachersky, an assistant professor of marketing, reported such findings in “Reduce Content or Raise Price? The Impact of Persuasion Knowledge and Unit Price Increase Tactics on Retailer and Product Brand Attitudes,” which is slated for publication in the Journal of Retailing.

“When people with high PTPK saw a decrease in the product amount, they were more likely to suspect they were being tricked and that the company was trying to make more profit,” he said.

“They wouldn’t think, ‘The company’s costs must have gone up, so they’re trying to keep the retail price steady,’” he said.

On the other hand, if the amount remains constant but the price increases, people with low PTPK are more likely to blame the store but not the coffee maker.

“Because they have less understanding of how distribution works—or marketplace pricing tactics in general—they tend to react to the entity that’s nearest to them, which is the retailer,” he said.

This parsing of the psychology of pricing constitutes roughly half of the research that Kachersky has pursued since joining the Fordham Schools of Business in 2008.

He also explores the influence of self-concept in consumer judgments, most recently in “Do Moniker Maladies Afflict Name Brand Letter Brands? A Dual Process of Name Letter Branding and Avoidance Effects,” which appeared this year in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

In that study, he wanted to know how first letters in product names affected consumers. While prior research found that people named Denise have a greater propensity to subconsciously choose Dove chocolate and live in Denver, Kachersky found that sometimes name letters can drive people away. For example, someone with the last name Sheen might consciously deny being related to the self-destructive actor with the same name.

“First, I looked at whether buyers on eBay tended to pair up with sellers based on common first characters in their screen names. I found that it happened, but I also found something odd. When the prices of items grew out of sync with their perceived values, buyers started to separate from sellers based on that same characteristic,” he said.

“When you’re operating in a transaction environment such as eBay, there is an element of risk. As a buyer, you might think, ‘That person on the other end could be fraudulent.’ At a subconscious level, if the seller has the same name letter as you, then you want to avoid an association with him or her.”

Kachersky understands that many people regard the field of marketing with a degree of cynicism. As the project coordinator for the Center for Positive Marketing at Fordham, he is determined to return marketing to its roots as an inherently positive phenomenon.

“Many people who call themselves marketers clearly are a nuisance to consumers. Marketing is supposed to provide value to customers; it’s supposed to help them solve a problem or satisfy a need,” he said. “The center approaches marketing from that perspective and promotes it.”

The center is hosting the Conference for Positive Marketing on Nov. 4, where it will unveil a new initiative called V Positive, Kachersky said. V Positive complements other indices that measure the dollar value of brands, such as Millward Brown’s Brand Z.

“Brand Z is firm-focused, not people-focused, so it only captures half of the value exchange as it relates to marketing. It tells you what the company gets back, but it doesn’t tell you what the company gives to customers,” he said.

“V Positive will fill that void. It will tell us the extent to which—and exactly how—companies are impacting people’s lives.”

To do that, brands will be measured in several categories and receive a number that indicates their impact on people’s lives.

“Because we can drill down these numbers into separate categories, companies can pinpoint where they need to pick up the slack and where they can make a difference. It will show them where people feel they need improvement.”

Kachersky doesn’t underestimate the difficulty of truly positive marketing. No one company does it best, although Amazon.com’s frustration-free packaging is a good example.

“Amazon solves a problem for customers because it has eliminated the frustrating experience of trying to open the product,” he said.

“As a result, customers are more willing to shop with Amazon. So you have a win for the consumer, a win for the marketer, and then because you’re not using plastic, you can recycle the packaging. It’s a win for everybody.”

One of the prizes, the Gladys and Henry Crown Award for Faculty Excellence, is given to a full-time faculty member in the Graduate School of Business Administration (GBA) whose exceptional performance and devotion to the school’s ideals and goals warrant extraordinary recognition.

The other, the Stanley Fuchs Faculty Award, is presented to a full-time faculty member who has made an impact on students through his or her dedication and commitment to the student body.

“Professor Kabadayi is an exceptional contributor to the School and the University, and we are proud that GBA students have chosen to recognize him with this double honor,” said David A. Gautschi, Ph.D., dean of the Graduate School of Business Administration. “His diverse background in international industry, as well as his research interests, enable him to bring a global perspective to the classroom that can help our graduates compete in a today’s business environment.”

“If anyone deserves both, particularly at the same time, it’s Professor Kabadayi,” said Dawn Lerman, Ph.D., associate professor and area chair of marketing. “He is highly engaged with students in and beyond the classroom, and he demands a lot from them.

“This year, for students in his GBA classes, he purposely raised the bar—which was already quite high—to ensure that they worked hard and got the most out of class,” Lerman said.

Indeed, Kabadayi admits to challenging his students with an interactive teaching style that embodies a holistic approach of care for the whole person—a style that imparts lifelong learning skills to students.

“It is gratifying to me that students recognize the effort that I put into my teaching. They respond by putting effort into their learning,” he said. “I know that I am a demanding and challenging teacher who cares deeply about his students. My goal is to create active learners—not passive students.”

In addition to fulfilling his teaching load with distinction, Kabadayi has also accomplished significant research, with three published papers appearing this year.

“The Role of Wireless Service Provider (WSP) Trust on Consumer Acceptance of SMS Advertising,” written with Luke Kachersky, Ph.D., assistant professor of marketing, will appear in the International Journal of Internet Marketing and Advertising. “Choosing the Right Multiple Channel System to Minimize Transaction Costs” will appear in Industrial Marketing Management. Another paper, “Made In China But Sold At FAO Schwarz,” written with Lerman, was published in the International Marketing Review.

Kabadayi also authored an opinion piece in the Feb. 11 issue of Business Insider on the challenges AT&T faces after losing its iPhone monopoly.

He serves as faculty advisor to the Fordham GBA Student Marketing Society and is the academic director of both the Global Professional MBA Program and the recently announced Three-Continent Master of Global Management program.

Kabadayi joined the Fordham business faculty in 2005 after receiving his doctorate from Baruch College of the City University of New York. He will receive his awards on May 15 at the GBA Dean’s List and Awards Ceremony.

The center aims to promote the positive view of marketing shared by the business schools’ marketing faculty: “That it exists to help people,” said Luke Kachersky, Ph.D., assistant professor of marketing and the project coordinator for the center, which hopes to dispel the notion of marketing as a four-letter word.

“Marketing should deliver value,” Kachersky said, which can be broken down into two components—well-being and happiness.

By examining these notions, the research of CPM’s faculty and student fellows aims to shed light on how marketers can deliver greater value to, and receive greater value from, consumers. The center also plans to develop an index for measuring consumer value and well-being that can be used in industry and across cultures.

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Emotional measures are crucial to understanding value in a developed country like the United States, said Kachersky, where most people’s basic needs are met with ease. To that end, CPM will focus on marketers’ efforts to promote value through another feel-good concept—social responsibility.CPM’s undergraduate research fellow Robert Pigué, a senior in Fordham College at Rose Hill, found that people measure their happiness and success relative to the success of others. A key question for marketers then, he said, is “How do you make everyone feel better than those around them?”

Dawn Lerman, Ph.D., area chair of marketing and the center’s director, brought up the example of a recent attempt at eco-friendly packaging by SunChips. Despite this effort to make chip eaters feel good, the new bag was deemed too noisy and the company pulled it.

“Business gets criticized even when we try to do good,” Lerman said, adding that CPM should take charge in determining how all parties in the value exchange can do their part to make it mutually beneficial.

“This is a national conversation—the balance between profitability and well-being,” she said. “As a Jesuit business school, with the potential to influence future business leaders, we shouldn’t just be simply recipients of this conversation, or even just part of it. We should be leading it.”

The Center for Positive Marketing has been operating since its soft launch at the beginning of the spring semester. Lerman and Kachersky run the center, along with Marcia Flicker, Ph.D., associate professor of marketing, but as Lerman pointed out, it was conceived by all of the marketing faculty members—with their varied expertise—upon realizing that they shared a common goal: to put forth a positive view of an oft-maligned field.

Faculty will not be the only force behind the center. CPM is recruiting an executive in residence, a business leader who can bring cutting-edge practices to the classroom and connect students with opportunities in the business world. In addition to Pigué, the center also supports undergraduate research fellow Caitlin Zwick and graduate fellow Ann Bobel of the Graduate School of Business Administration.

“They are setting the foundation for us,” Kachersky said. Future fellows will collect primary data and be involved in one of the center’s most important projects: the index measuring consumer value and well-being.

If marketers want to deliver value, they need to have a formal way to measure consumers’ perception of value. “Intuitive understanding is not sufficient,” Kachersky said.

The index will be used to look at fluctuation in these perceptions over time, much like the consumer confidence index. Kachersky also views it as a tool to examine consumer value in other cultures where basic daily needs are not always met.

“And we can get brand specific,” he said, by approaching a company and helping it explore the success of a particular marketing campaign.

– Nicole LeRosa

The academy cited Kachersky for his teaching, use of technology in the classroom, and assessments of student learning based on recommendations from peers, students and administrators.

“Luke does not just teach his students in the sense of imparting knowledge,” said Dawn Lerman, Ph.D., associate professor and area chair of marketing. “He also seeks to reach them and to engage them in ways that will benefit their classroom learning but also serve them outside of the classroom.”

This is not the first accolade Kachersky has received for his teaching abilities. He was honored in 2010 with the Cura Personalis Award for challenging students while providing them support to excel. He also earned the Marketing Area Teaching Excellence Award for 2009.

Among his many—and perhaps less official, noteworthy achievements—Kachersky has won praise from his students for his approach to teaching marketing research. That staple of marketing programs is, said Lerman, “notoriously feared by students and one that yields lower than average evaluations, regardless of the instructor.”

Kachersky reverses the teaching progression so that students learn data analysis before research design, allowing them to understand and appreciate nuances of the entire research process. He also incorporates social media into his courses to provide students with an understanding of how such media provide market insights.

“Ours is a dynamic field, perhaps the most among all courses of study in higher education,” Kachersky said. “We, as marketing professors, are charged with an insurmountable task of making sense of a field that changes continuously. If we embrace the process and the burden of struggling with this task, we can deliver much value to our students, enabling them to confront similarly unresolvable issues in their lives and careers.”

In addition to his teaching load, Kachersky is a busy scholar with two papers scheduled for publication this year: “Do Moniker Maladies Afflict Name Letter Brands? A Dual Process Theory of Name Letter Branding and Avoidance Effects” in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology; and “The Role of Wireless Service Provider Trust on Consumer Acceptance of SMS Advertising,” co-authored with his Fordham colleague, Assistant Professor of Marketing Sertan Kabadayi, Ph.D., in the International Journal of Internet Marketing and Advertising.

Kachersky is also one of the driving forces, along with Lerman and Associate Professor of Marketing Marcia Flicker, Ph.D., behind Fordham’s newest research center, the Center for Positive Marketing. The center studies marketing from the demand (consumers’) as opposed to the supply (marketers’) perspective.

Kachersky joined the Fordham business faculty in 2008 after receiving his doctorate from Baruch College of the City University of New York. He will receive his award, and make a presentation on his classroom success, in May at the AMS Annual Conference in Coral Gables, Fla.

—Syd Steinhardt