Department of Business Administration
New Happenings
Dr. Eric W. Ford, an expert on information technology in healthcare who has written extensively on electronic healthcare records, has joined the faculty of The University of North Carolina at Greensboro as the Forsyth Medical Center Distinguished Professor. Ford, who begins his tenure this month, has a joint appointment in the Bryan School of Business and Economics and the School of Nursing.
Ford comes to Greensboro from Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas, where he held an endowed professorship honoring the namesake of the Jerry S. Rawls School of Business. Ford also served as the director of The Center for Health Innovation and Research at Texas Tech.
Prior to Texas Tech, Ford worked as an associate professor in the Department of Health Systems Management in the School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine at Tulane University and held an endowed professorship in the Department of Health Policy & Administration in Pennsylvania State University’s College of Health & Human Development.
Ford earned a PhD in health services administration from the University of Birmingham – Alabama in 2000 and a master’s in public health from the University of South Carolina in Columbia in 1997. His research interests include issues of strategic management in healthcare and ways that information systems impact performance.
Marketing 429, Advanced Marketing Management, serves as a capstone course for marketing majors. For the second half of the semester, student teams work with a local for-profit or nonprofit organization to develop a marketing strategy.
This semester one team worked with the Greensboro Education Consortium. The Consortium consists of 12 local educational organizations such as the Greensboro Public Library, the Children's Museum, Greenhill Art Gallery, Greensboro Historical Museum, and the Natural Science Center. These 12 organizations offer outstanding programs, but there is a lack of public awareness of the scope and nature of what all these organizations offer. Moreover, they were not coordinating their marketing efforts. The students' assignment was to address these problems.
The students conducted primary and secondary research and recommended the development of an umbrella organization, GC-Kids, that would target caregivers of children up to 13 years old in Guilford County. They recommended a number of promotional activities that would increase community awareness of the educational opportunities these organizations offered, increase attendance, and improve educational opportunities for young people.
The student group presented its report as a part of UNCG's Undergraduate Research Exposition, a campus-wide event showcasing undergraduate research projects. The marketing group won first place in the Behavioral Sciences category and received a $1,000 prize for its work.
Associate Professor Lew Brown pointed out that not only did the students do an outstanding job for this semester's project, they also laid the groundwork for an ongoing relationship between the UNCG's Bryan School and the organizations. "The students recommended that the organizations use interns to help run the GC-Kids' programs and that they use Bryan School marketing classes to conduct additional research. This is the kind of ongoing community involvement UNCG and the Bryan School want to establish," Brown added. He also noted that, "My students have worked with about 85 different organizations over the last few years. I believe this was one of the most difficult projects we have undertaken because of the number of organizations involved in one project and their different objectives."
Team members were: Daniel Englebretson, Lavonda Daniels, Bethany Brown, Latasha Herring, and Cynamon Frierson. Polly Black, Chief Marketing Officer for BoldMouth, Inc., served as a Bryan Business Mentor for the group.
At UNCG's Undergraduate Honors and Awards Ceremony on May 6, Kyra Haifley, a senior marketing major, received a Student Excellence Award, UNCG's top honor for an undergraduate student. The award recognizes both academic excellence and contributions to the community.
Kyra has a 3.78 cumulative GPA and besides participating in numerous university and community activities, she has interned at Trone Advertising, VF Corporation, and Market America.
Dr. Lew Brown nominated Kyra, and Dr. Nicholas Williamson seconded the nomination. Both noted that Kyra was one of the most outstanding undergraduate students they had worked with, each having been on the Bryan School's faculty for more than 20 years.
