College of Graduate Studies

Carolyn Massiah

Professor

Bridgeville, DE

College of Business Administration
Business Administration PhD, Marketing Track

Research Focus:

Marketing of services and experiences

Carolyn Massiah, PhD is passionate about sales and marketing, to say the least. As her sons were growing up, she would critique their sales pitch whenever they begged her for the newest toys and would go crazy hearing her many marketing lectures. After all, everything comes down to sales and marketing, she says, “From the moment you open your mouth, you are hoping that someone is buying what you are saying (selling)…It all comes down to what value (product) you are offering and what sacrifice (price) you are asking them to give up.”

Dr. Massiah earned her bachelor’s in Business Administration with a dual emphasis of Marketing and Travel and Tourism Management from the University of New Mexico. From there, she went on to earn a Master’s of Business Administration with a dual emphasis on Marketing and International Management from the University of Colorado. It was here that Massiah’s interest in academia began to grow as she became a graduate assistant for two Marketing professors.

After completing her doctoral studies in Marketing at Arizona State University, she began looking for a university to teach in that was diverse in the student body across gender, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status. “I was a first-generation student and I knew that I would be able to bring a great deal in the way of mentoring students who were in the same situation,” she says. UCF not only delivered on this front, but her colleagues were research active and eager to contribute to the academic field, ultimately leading her to the university.

Now, she can be seen bringing that passion for sales and marketing not just to her sons, but also to her many students where she is most rewarded by those who may begin struggling but eventually turn those struggles into success. For students going through struggles or failures, she advises, “Take every failure as the semi-colon that it is. When we read long sentences, we come to semi-colons, we pause, we take a breath, and we continue. We don’t stop.”

Dr. Massiah was honored as one of the 31 women faculty to be recognized by UCF for Women’s History Month 2020. She has also received the Teaching Incentive Program Award (2020, 2015, 2010), Meritorious Teaching Award in Marketing Management Association’s 14^th Annual Teacher Award Competition (2016), and is a Young Alumni Hall of Fame Inductee in the Anderson School of Management at the University of Mexico (2010). Along with these accomplishments, she was also published in the Journal of Consumer Behaviour for her work titled, “Non-Monetary and Nonreciprocal Freecycling: Motivations for Participating in Online Alternative Giving Communities” with colleagues Fan Liu and Tina Lowrey (2020).