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The (AMA) has awarded the prestigious Louis W. Stern Award for 2025 to a paper co-authored by , associate dean for Executive Education at �������� and associate professor of marketing at the Costello College of Business.

The award’s namesake, Louis W. Stern, is the John D. Gray Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Marketing at the Kellogg School of Management, best known for his influential work on marketing channels.

Josephson describes Stern as “one of the founding godfathers of marketing, especially on the interorganizational side, involving B-to-B channels and distribution.” Appropriately, the Louis W. Stern Award is given annually by the AMA’s Interorganizational Special Interest Group, in recognition of “a published article that has made a significant and lasting contribution to the field of interorganizational marketing and channels of distribution.”

The winning paper, “,” was published in Journal of Marketing in 2019. Josephson’s co-authors were Ju-yeon Lee of Iowa State University, and Babu John Mariadoss and Jean L. Johnson of Washington State University-Pullman.

The paper proceeded from Josephson’s observation that “the notion of the government as a customer — not just any customer, but the largest, most impactful customer in the world — had been left out of the business scholarship consensus.”

To fill the knowledge gap, the researchers conducted in-depth interviews with sector experts, who highlighted the additional transaction costs inherent in the B2G (business to government) space. “The interviewees were saying that government contracting had all these idiosyncratic costs, and it was really hard to diversify away from government contracting,” Josephson says. “If you wanted to be in this space, you had to be all in.”

By the same token, companies were rewarded for upping their commitment to government clients. Comparing firm value metrics to actual government contracts, the researchers found that the more a company’s portfolio was weighted toward B2G, the more market benefits it enjoyed.

However, there can be risks associated with deepening involvement in government contracting. Because federal agency budgets are linked to political priorities, they can change quickly and unpredictably. Josephson and his co-authors discovered that companies could hedge against that risk by catering to a greater number of government clients. Those with a more concentrated B2G portfolio faced higher risks when taking on more government contracting, but saw higher gains in firm value on the whole. 

The dynamics of the B2G sector lend themselves to increasing specialization, Josephson says. “Just because you have knowledge of a customer, there’s no guarantee you know how to translate that to someone else, and if anything, it can become a detriment because you don’t know how to speak that customer’s language.”

With the government contracting ecosystem adjusting to rapidly shifting political winds, Josephson’s findings may be even more relevant today than they were in 2019. The risks Josephson describes in his paper are hitting close to home for contractors with deep ties to civilian agencies, while military contractors may be basking in a proposed for the Department of Defense.

Nevertheless, Josephson does not expect to see serious attrition in the B2G ecosystem anytime soon. “Even with cuts and uncertainty and ambiguity, the federal government is still the largest customer in the world, hands down.”

The Louis W. Stern Award stands as gratifying proof of the paper’s ongoing impact and influence. “Past winners include not only some of my academic advisors, but also many other people who have made major contributions to marketing scholarship,” Josephson says. “So it’s pretty awesome, even just to be on that list.”

The award will be granted at the AMA’s annual summer conference in Chicago.