Education

Dr. Robert Allen Peterson Jr. is an award-winning professor whose expertise has made him a highly regarded leader within the faculty at The University of Texas at Austin (UT). For this, he is distinguished as the university’s John T. Stuart III Centennial Chair in Business Administration. Dr. Peterson is a graduate of the University of Minnesota, where he earned a Bachelor of Science in 1966, a Master of Science in 1968 and a Ph.D. in 1970. That same year, he joined the faculty at UT as an assistant professor of marketing.

As the associate dean for research at UT, Dr. Peterson’s research and teaching interests have been concentrated in the areas of consumer behavior, market structures, marketing management, marketing communication, marketing models, and marketing strategy. In particular, he has focused on the emotional implications of customer satisfaction and how it applies to repeat purchases. In his research, Dr. Peterson found that customer service surveys that use language such as “satisfied” or “dissatisfied” lent itself to the customer wandering to other service providers, even in the case of a positive experience; however, in using terms such as “love” or “hate” when referring to customer satisfaction, it led to a deeper connection to the business at hand. Dr. Peterson has written on this subject, along with many others centered on business-to-consumer selling, technology-centric marketing techniques, and e-commerce. In total, he has published more than 150 articles to prominent journals, including the Journal of Psychology, the International Journal of Market Research, the Journal of Business Research, the Journal of Applied Psychology, Corporate Reputation Review, and the Journal of Economic Psychology. Most recently, Dr. Peterson partnered with Yeolib Kim to publish “A Meta-Analysis of Online Trust Relationships in E-commerce,” in the Journal of Interactive Marketing.

In recognition of his professional excellence throughout his lengthy career, Dr. Peterson has received high praise from the American Medical Association, Academy of Marketing Science and the American Marketing Association, just to name a few. Additionally, he was featured in Who’s Who in Finance and Business, Who’s Who in America, Who’s Who in American Education and Who’s Who in the South and Southwest. He was distinguished as a Charles Hurwitz fellow at the IC2 Institute at The University of Texas at Austin and a fellow of the American Marketing Association. When asked of his success, Dr. Peterson notes that he owes it to the support system that has encouraged his goals throughout his career, his mentors who have guided him, and his own education, which allowed him to become knowledgeable of his industry and confident in his professional opinions.

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