KU professor’s lifetime contributions to academic sales research earn American Marketing Association recognition

Murali K. Mantrala, Ned Fleming Professor of Marketing, has been named the 2026 recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Selling and Sales Management Special Interest Group of the American Marketing Association (AMA), one of the most distinguished honors in the field of academic sales research.

The award from the Sales Special Interest Group (SIG) recognizes scholars whose work has made enduring and influential contributions to the discipline over the course of their careers. Mantrala will be formally honored during the 2026 Winter AMA Conference, planned for Feb. 13–15 in Madrid, Spain.

With a research career spanning more than four decades, Mantrala has shaped the field with studies encompassing topics such as retail pricing, category management, advertising and sales resource allocation, sales force compensation, and two-sided platform marketing strategies. His work has been published in top academic journals including the Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Marketing, Marketing Science, Journal of Retailing, Marketing Letters, and Journal of Interactive Marketing.

Beyond his research, Mantrala has served as co-editor-in-chief of the Journal of Retailing and continues to contribute to the editorial boards of several leading marketing research journals.

Mantrala previously received the AMA’s 2021 Lifetime Achievement Award from its Retailing and Pricing SIG and the 2020 Don McBane Special Recognition Award from its Sales SIG. In 2010, he received the prestigious Humboldt Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Berlin, Germany.

Mantrala joined the KU Business faculty in 2020 and is a professor emeritus of the University of Missouri, Columbia. His international academic engagements include visiting professorships at the S. P. Jain Institute of Management and Research in Mumbai, India, and at the Indian School of Business. Earlier in his career, he held roles as the J.C. Penney Associate Professor at the University of Florida, manager at ZS Associates, and regional sales manager at Sandoz Pharmaceuticals, in Mumbai, India.