Marketing education innovators honored with the Jack R. Wentworth Lifetime Impact Award

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. – Two retired marketing faculty at the Indiana University Kelley School of Business – Jonlee Andrews and Rosann Spiro – were honored on Aug. 17 with the Jack R. Wentworth Lifetime Impact Award.

The Wentworth Award is named for the three-time alumnus who taught at Kelley from 1959 to 1997 and led the school as its dean from 1984 to 1993. Wentworth helped establish the Consortium for Graduate Studies in Management, which supports MBA students from underrepresented populations, as well as the Johnson Center for Entrepreneurship & Innovation and the Center for Real Estate Studies. He passed away in 2017 at the age of 89.

The Wentworth Award recognizes the lifetime achievements of “truly exceptional individuals who had a substantial and enduring impact on the Kelley School and the marketing discipline through their research, teaching, and service.” Recipients are chosen for the highly selective award through a vote of senior marketing faculty and approval from the dean.

Like Wentworth, Andrews and Spiro helped lay a foundation for Kelley’s success – working to position the school as a leading marketing program today.

“It’s nice to stop and reflect on the cumulative contributions and impact that an individual can make over time,” said Pat Hopkins, vice dean of Kelley Bloomington and the Conrad Prebys Professor. “The colleagues we are honoring today – Jonlee Andrews and Rosann Spiro — have made wonderful, lasting contributions to the Kelley community through their scholarship, teaching, leadership and mentorship.”

Hopkins spoke about how Andrews and Spiro heightened research and scholarly discussion among their peers, engaged and collaborated with corporate partners and hiring companies and inspired and propelled students toward success.

“On top of all that, you have been exceptional colleagues,” he added.

Jonlee Andrews

Andrews, clinical professor emerita of marketing, developed the MBA courses, “Brand Asset Management,” and “Consumer Channels Management,” which taught future marketing and brand managers at consumer goods companies how to grow and leverage a brand’s assets and to obtain and sustain desired levels of support from retail channels, respectively.

She also co-created and for more than 20 years led the Consumer Marketing Academy, which has helped many of its 900 students to become leaders at some of the nation’s leading consumer packaged goods companies. Her past students include Shannon Watkins, Nike Global CMO for the Jordan Brand; Vikrant Batra, chief marketing officer at HP; Siddharth Lal, vice president of marketing at T-Mobile; and Unyi Agba, vice president of L’Oreal Paris (NY); just to name a few.

She also created the Center for Brand Leadership and Bloomington Brands, an innovative collaboration with the Scotts Company to manage one of its orphan brands, Osmocote.

Andrews earned her Ph.D. in Business from the University of Wisconsin in 1992 and served on the faculty of the Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University until 1999, when she joined the Kelley School’s Marketing Department.  In recognition for her research and teaching contributions, she was awarded the Nestlé Faculty Fellowship in 2005.

For six years, Andrews served as associate chair of the Full-Time MBA Program, where she managed student recruiting and admissions, and then as program chair for another four years. She was the first female professor to receive the Lilly Outstanding MBA Teaching award, the most prestigious teaching honor at the Kelley School. She retired in 2020 but remained involved at Kelley until this spring.

Rosann Spiro

Spiro retired in 2014 after teaching at Kelley for 30 “influential” years,” noted Shanker Krishnan, professor of marketing and the Nestle-Hustad Professor of Marketing, in her retirement tribute. “Rosann has had a rich and versatile career and distinguished herself as a thoughtful leader, a passionate researcher, and an influential educator,” he said.

Spiro received her PhD in Business Administration at the University of Georgia in 1976, nine years after earning an MBA from IU. She began her career with Shell Oil Co., first as an economist and statistician and later as a senior sales representative, which fueled her academic interest in sales management.

Spiro’s first academic position was as an assistant professor at the University of Tennessee, where she was promoted to associate professor with tenure. In 1982, she joined the Kelley faculty as a visiting professor and was asked to join the Marketing Department in 1984. Her research has appeared in leading marketing journals, including the Journal of Marketing, the Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Business Research, Journal of Consumer Research, and the Journal of Personal Selling and Sales Management.

She co‑authored of the leading sales management text, “Management of a Sales Force,” and developed numerous sales related courses, such as “Personal Selling,” “Sales Management,” “Business to Business Marketing,” and “Sales for Social Impact.” She was the architect of Kelley’s professional sales major.

She served as the first president of the World Marketing Association and as chairperson of the board of the American Marketing Association. For six years, she chaired the Marketing Department and was executive director of the Center for Global Sales Leadership from 2009 to 2014.

In recognition of her many contributions to the field, Spiro was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Selling and Sales Management Strategic Interest Group of the American Marketing Association in 2008 and the Academy of Marketing Science Distinguished Marketing Educator award in 2012.

Her legacy will continue to impact students through the Rosann Spiro Scholarship, which supports Kelley undergraduate students interested in pursuing a professional sales career.