DIONNE A. NICKERSON Scheller College of Business Georgia Institute of Technology Atlanta, GA

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1 DIONNE A. NICKERSON Atlanta, GA EDUCATION, Atlanta, GA Ph.D. Marketing, expected 2019 Providence College, Providence, RI M.B.A. Marketing Brown University, Providence, RI A.B. Engineering RESEARCH INTERESTS Substantive: Sustainability, Corporate Social Responsibility, Luxury Branding, Brand Strategy Methodological: Panel data econometrics, Event Studies DISSERTATION Three Essays on the Effects of Corporate Social Responsibility on Brand and Firm Outcomes (Proposal successfully defended: May 2018; Expected date of completion) Co-Chairs: Professors Sundar Bharadwaj and Ajay K. Kohli Committee: Professors Sara L. Dommer, Adithya Pattabhiramaiah, Omar Rodriguez PUBLICATION Horne, Daniel R., Dionne Nickerson, and Mark DeFanti. (2015). Improving Supply Chain Efficiency through Electronic Payments: The Case of Microentrepreneurs in Kenya and Tanzania. Journal of Marketing Channels, 22(2), RESEARCH IN PROGRESS Nickerson, Dionne, Adithya Pattabhiramaiah and Michael Lowe, When Doing Good, What Good to Do? Examining Whether and Why Firms Benefit from their CSR Initiatives. In preparation for journal submission. Nickerson, Dionne and Atanas Nikolov, Corporate Social Responsibility and Financial Performance: Does the Chief Marketing Officer Matter? In preparation for journal submission. Nickerson, Dionne, Omar Rodriguez-Vila, Sundar Bharadwaj, and Ujwal Kayande. Societal Benefits: A Brand Equity View on CSR Value. Dissertation Essay 3, In preparation for journal submission. Rodriguez-Vila, Omar, Dionne Nickerson, Sundar Bharadwaj, and Ujwal Kayande. From Societal Benefits to Brand Equity: The role of country-market characteristics. Data collected. Nickerson, Dionne and Sara L. Dommer, Sustainably Chic: How Sustainability Claims Affect Consumer Attitudes toward Luxury Brands. Conceptualization stage. CONFERENCE PRESENTATIONS

2 Nickerson, Dionne, Adithya Pattabhiramaiah and Michael Lowe. Does It Pay to Be Virtuous? Examining Whether and Why Firms Benefit from Their CSR Initiatives INFORMS Marketing Science Conference Annual Conference, June Nickerson, Dionne and Atanas Nikolov. Corporate Social Responsibility and Financial Performance: Does The Chief Marketing Officer Matter? PhD Project Baruch College Research Symposium, April Nickerson, Dionne and Sara L. Dommer, Sustainably Chic: How Sustainability Claims Affect Consumer Attitudes toward Luxury Fashion Brands, Marketing Strategy Consortium, Featured Presenter, March Nickerson, Dionne and Omar Rodriguez-Vila, CSR is Central: The Effect of CSR Claim Centrality on Brand Benefits and Brand Attitude, American Marketing Association, Summer Conference, August Nickerson, Dionne and Sara L. Dommer, Sustainably Chic: How Sustainability Claims Affect Consumer Attitudes toward Luxury Fashion Brands, Sustainable Fashion Consumption Symposium, Ulm, Germany, June Nickerson, Dionne, Atanas Nikolov, and Phi Cong Hoang. Corporate Social Responsibility and Financial Performance: Does The Chief Marketing Officer Matter? INFORMS Marketing Science Conference Annual Conference, June Nickerson, Dionne and Omar Rodriguez-Vila, Benefitting from Sustainability: How Sustainability Claims Affect Brand Attitude through Product Benefits, American Marketing Association, Winter Conference, February Nickerson, Dionne, Sustainable Fashion: How Sustainability Claims Affect Consumer Attitudes towards Fashion Brands, Ray C. Anderson Center for Sustainable Business Seminar Series, Atlanta, GA February Nickerson, Dionne, Luxurious Sustainability: How Sustainability Attributes Affect Consumer Attitudes towards Luxury Brands, LVMH-SMU Luxury Research Conference, Singapore, Singapore, June AWARDS, HONORS, AND GRANTS Emerald/EFMD Outstanding Doctoral Research Award in Marketing ( 1,000), 2018 ISMS Doctoral Consortium Fellow 2018 Marketing Strategy Consortium Selected Presenter, 2018 Marketing Strategy Consortium Fellow, 2018 Baruch College PhD Project Doctoral Research Fellow, 2018 Bentley University Strategies for Success in the College Classrooms, 2018 AMA-Sheth Doctoral Consortium Fellow, 2017 NBMBAA-Atlanta Doctoral Scholarship ($2,500), 2017 Serve Learn Sustain Course Support Funding ($2,000), 2017 Diversity and Inclusion Fellow ($1,000), 2017 American Marketing Association Valuing Diversity Scholarship ($1,000), 2016 Ray C. Anderson Center for Sustainable Business Research Grant ($1,000), 2016 Beta Gamma Sigma, National Business Collegiate Honor Society Outstanding Graduate 2013 and Highest GPA Providence College School of Business MBA Program

3 SERVICE & COMMUNITY INVOLVEMENT Vice Chair of Membership Insights Doctoral Student SIG, American Marketing Association ( ) Diversity and Inclusion Council, ( ) Math and Science Tutor, Cristo Rey Atlanta Jesuit High School ( ) MBA Student Council, Providence College ( ) TEACHING EXPERIENCE Instructor,, Fall 2017 Sustainable Marketing (self-developed; first time offered at Georgia Tech undergraduate level) Course Overall effectiveness 5/5 Tech to Teaching Participant,, Certificate program designed to develop graduate students teaching skills through teaching experience and evaluation Adjunct Instructor, Providence College, Principles of Marketing (8 sections) Course Overall effectiveness 3.8/5 SELECT PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE Providence College MBA Program, Providence, RI, Graduate Assistant, Assisted marketing professors with data collection and analysis Foresight Science &Technology, Providence, RI, Team Leader & Commercialization Analyst, Prepared market research reports for clean energy start-ups funded by the EPA and DOE Provided training and on-going support to junior analysts and experienced professionals French Ministry of Education, Troyes, France, Language Assistant, Provided English language instruction to elementary school students and education professionals SKILLS Software Packages: Stata, SAS, SPSS, R French: Professional proficiency Diplôme Approfondi de Langue Française (DALF) C1 SELECTED COURSEWORK Marketing Theory Construction Ajay Kohli Marketing Strategy Sundar Bharadwaj (UGA) Empirical Models in Marketing Douglas Bowman (Emory) Strategic Management Research Matthew Higgins Consumer Behavior Ryan Hamilton (Emory) Research Design Phillip Ackerman Methods Statistical Modeling and Regression Analysis Brani Vidaković Statistical Analysis I James Roberts Statistical Analysis II Davood Tofighi

4 Longitudinal Data Analysis Models and Methods for Causal Inference in Management Multivariate Statistics Multilevel Theory and Methods Design and Analysis of Experiments Gregory Martin Alexander Oettl James Roberts Eugene Kim C. F. Jeff Wu Others Individual Behavior in Organizations Charles Parsons Best Practices in Teaching Deborah Turner Course Design Kate Williams REFERENCES Ajay K. Kohli (Co-Advisor) Sundar Bharadwaj (Co-Advisor) Professor of Marketing The Coca-Cola Company Chair Professor of Marketing Gary T. and Elizabeth R. Jones Chair University of Georgia Terry College of Business Sara L. Dommer Adithya Pattabhiramaiah Assistant Professor of Marketing Assistant Professor of Marketing ABSTRACTS When Doing Good, What Good to Do? Examining Whether and Why Firms Benefit from their CSR Initiatives with Adithya Pattabhiramaiah and Michael Lowe (Dissertation Essay 1) Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has become an integral part of brand strategy for most firms. However, the important question of whether CSR initiatives have an impact on a brand s sales remains unanswered. While metaanalyses suggest a small, positive effect of firm CSR engagement on firm financial performance, many studies have produced mixed results, with the impact from CSR being not significant or even negative, in some cases. Focusing primarily on consumer response to CSR, we introduce and test a new framework for categorizing CSR activities and document the potential influence of different types of CSR engagement on brand sales. Specifically, we distinguish between three types of CSR activities: correcting the negative impact of a brand s business operations through changes to that brand s products or processes, compensating for the negative impact of business operations without actually altering operations, and cultivating consumer goodwill through activities unrelated to the negative impact of business operations. To investigate this relationship, we leverage a database of CSR press releases issued by several top consumer packaged goods brands as well as detailed sales data for those brands. We employ the generalized synthetic control method to measure the causal effect of firms CSR announcements on brand sales. We find differential effects for the various CSR activity types on sales response. We also explore the mechanism behind this effect under controlled experimental settings. Our experimental results show that conditional on brand reputation, CSR type influences perceptions of brand sincerity and thereby attitudes towards the brand. This work provides important insights for brand managers looking to incorporate CSR into their marketing strategy repertoire. Corporate Social Responsibility and Financial Performance: Does the Chief Marketing Officer Matter? with Atanas Nikolov (Dissertation Essay 2) Chief marketing officers (CMOs) have a multifaceted role with responsibilities that include gathering and interpreting

5 market information, developing and managing relationships with customers and stakeholders, and identifying investment opportunities in a firm s market environment. As customers become more concerned about environmental and social issues, CMOs are well-positioned to aid in the effective implementation of CSR initiatives. This study posits that CMOs play a critical role in incorporating CSR into firm strategy and, thereby, helping firms reap financial benefits from CSR. The analysis utilizes a novel dataset comprising 700 firms over an eleven-year period ( ). Results reveal that CMOs help firms reduce societal costs in domains most relevant to end-customers (product offerings), yielding the greatest payoffs to financial performance. This relationship is also influenced by factors that influence CMOs decision-making with respect to CSR, namely gender and compensation structure. While female CMOs have a greater effect on reducing societal costs than their male counterparts, CMOs compensated with a higher share of bonuses decrease societal costs, seemingly at the expense of societal benefits. Societal Benefits: A Brand Equity View on CSR Value with Omar Rodriguez-Vila, Sundar Bharadwaj, and Ujwal Kayande (Dissertation Essay 3, Data Analysis Stage) Prior work suggests that brand-level actions can influence the strength, favorability, and uniqueness of brand associations, thereby affecting Customer-Based Brand Equity. The literature explains the effect of these brand-level actions through the lens of brand benefits, which provide consumers with personal utility. For example, product claims are typically tied to performance associations, which communicate the brand s ability to meet consumers functional needs. We posit that a brand s societal benefits, related to its efforts in meeting societal needs, can also influence consumer behavior and customer-based brand equity. The current work seeks to show that CSR claims can enhance societal benefits, which can thereby increase consumer likelihood of choosing a brand. This work also examines the moderating effects of product category (vice and virtue) and corporate ability on the relationship between CSR claims, societal benefits, and consumer choice. In one of the few studies to explore the marketing implications of CSR on consumers in the developing world, we use a series of discrete choice experiments and secondary data collected from consumers in Brazil. Sustainably Chic: How Sustainability Claims Affect Consumer Attitudes toward Luxury Brands with Sara L. Dommer (Conceptualization Stage) Today, brands are increasingly introducing products with sustainability claims (i.e., claims of improved environmental and/or social impact). Yet, prior work examining such products has focused almost entirely on low-cost consumer packaged goods. The differences between luxury and non-luxury fashion brands in terms of price, quality, and other underlying dimensions suggest that prior research on the effects of sustainability claims may not be applicable in the luxury context. This work explores the impact of sustainability claims on luxury fashion brands. The long-lasting nature of these products, the resource constraints related to the usage of rare raw materials usage, and the reliance on skilled labor hint at possible points of convergence between the sustainability and luxury concepts. Drawing from the literature on counter-stereotypes, this work posits that by leveraging conceptual overlaps and thereby communicating a stereotype exception, the sustainability liability (Luchs et al. 2010) can be reversed for luxury fashion brands. We ultimately seek to use a mixed methods approach, employing empirical modeling and experimental design to test these relationships. From Societal Benefits to Brand Equity: The role of country-market characteristics with Omar Rodriguez- Vila, Sundar Bharadwaj, and Ujwal Kayande (Data Collected) Although organizations have long engaged in socially responsible activities, many brands struggle with incorporating CSR into their overarching brand strategy. This work examines how CSR contributes to Customer-Based Brand Equity, specifically by enhancing consumer perceptions of the brand s benefits to society and the environment. Using data collected across fourteen developed and developing countries, the proposed study further explores how country characteristics (e.g. resource availability, infrastructure development, sociopolitical governance) can explain differences in consumers response to brand-level CSR initiatives. The empirical approach will leverage multilevel modeling techniques as well as a series of discrete choice experiments. This work contributes to the literature by demonstrating that CSR influences consumers evaluations of the brand by altering the value that consumers derive from the brand. With its specific focus on country characteristics, this work contributes to marketing literature by proposing an empirical test that offers insight that extends beyond the Western context.