Congratulations to Dr. Abigail (Abby) Nappier Cherup (Assistant Professor of Marketing, California State University, San Marcos) and Dr. André F. Maciel (Assistant Professor of Marketing, University of Nebraska) for being awarded an AMA-CBSIG Small Research Grant for their work titled “Safe Spaces: How to Create and Maintain Inclusive Services Environments.”
GENMAC congratulates these scholars for their well-deserved award and for their commitment to gender-focused research in the field of marketing.
About the Research
Safe Spaces: How to Create and Maintain Inclusive Services Environments
Across the United States and some other countries, a significant number of businesses use the term “safe space” to describe the type of environment and experience they offer to their customers. Put simply, this quality refers to a commitment to eliminating from the service environment all forms of discrimination based on individuals’ affiliations to core social categories, such as races, sexual orientations, religions, and age cohorts.
In the project supported by this grant, we will combine data from both the consumer and service provider perspectives in order to develop a comprehensive understanding of the practices and challenges involved in creating and maintaining safe spaces in the marketplace. With this work, we seek to make a theoretical contribution to the literature on servicescapes and stigmatized consumer identities. We also seek to provide managers with consumer-based guidance on how to create and maintain inclusive service environments.
[Safe space] refers to a commitment to eliminating from the service environment all forms of discrimination based on individuals’ affiliations to core social categories, such as races, sexual orientations, religions, and age cohorts.
Nappier Cherup and Maciel
About the AMA-CBSIG Small Research Grant
The American Marketing Association’s Consumer Behavior Special Interest Group provided this inaugural competitive grant opportunity for consumer behavior scholars, on the theme of ‘Managerially Relevant Consumer Insights’. A key objective of research funded by CBSIG is to show how insights and research on consumer behavior can be used to enhance managerial or public policy decision making, and especially how to support strategy formulation and implementation efforts. This research funding seeks to advance theory and evidence relating consumer insights to business strategies. For the 2020 CBSIG Small Research Grant, six competitive grants of $1500 each were awarded.