Benjamin Suarez was born in Canton, Ohio in 1941. He worked full time while attending The University of Akron and graduated in 1967. His first job upon graduating was as a computer scientist at Babcock and Wilcox, where he worked on computer applications for the production of nuclear reactors.

Suarez started Suarez Corporation Industries in the basement of his home in 1968 by marketing software that he created. SCI has since grown into a diversified marketing company housed in a 170,000 square foot facility in Canton, Ohio.



10/16/2006
Benjamin and Nancy Suarez Applied Marketing Research Laboratories Established
Akron, Ohio, Oct. 16, 2006 The University of Akron Foundation has entered into an Endowment Agreement with Benjamin Suarez and Nancy Suarez to establish an endowment for One Million Dollars named The Benjamin and Nancy Suarez Applied Marketing Research Laboratories. The Suarez Laboratories will support both business marketing undergraduate and graduate course offerings, as well as student and faculty research activities by providing faculty and students with the research capabilities for conducting studies pertinent to the theory and practice of marketing and business, and creating an experiential learning environment where students and faculty can acquire and hone the skills and competencies needed for conducting theoretical and applied research.

The Benjamin and Nancy Suarez Applied Marketing Research Laboratories represent the first laboratories created within the College of Business Administration of The University of Akron, serving core activities and interests in marketing research, market intelligence, and marketing analytics.

The University of Akron celebrated the opening of the Benjamin and Nancy Suarez Applied Marketing Research Laboratories with a dedication ceremony November 17, 2008 at its location on the fifth floor of UA’s Polsky Building.

The one-of-a-kind marketing research, teaching and experiential learning facility features three laboratories and a large classroom to provide students and faculty members the tools to convert knowledge into useful intelligence for the business community.

Features of the new facility include:

• A Cognitive Research Laboratory with state-of-the-art technologies focusing on techniques such as eye tracking, and brainwave and physiological analyses.

• A Marketing Intelligence Laboratory with eight workstations and two teamwork areas, where students and faculty members can develop comprehensive marketing reports on consumer, competitor, industry, business environment and socio-economic market intelligence. This laboratory also will be available to area businesses to conduct market analysis and product development.

• An Experiential Research Laboratory, where students and businesses can use techniques such as facial coding software to test the effectiveness of print advertisements, Web sites, TV commercials and video presentations, as well as survey respondents.

• The Suarez in the Square Classroom, an innovative class space built in an amphitheater format that can be used for courses or seminars.

Ben, a UA graduate, said the opportunity to establish the laboratories was a way to give something to the university community and to the region’s business community as well.

“I believe profitable sales are driven by a comprehensive understanding of the market and consumers. Because I have an undergraduate degree in psychology, I have always been interested in looking at the cognitive processes that go into purchase motivations, behaviors and actual decisions,” Ben said. “I donated the funding to create a facility that looks at marketing research in many traditional and new ways.

My vision for the Suarez Applied Marketing Research Laboratories is four-fold:


• to provide students with an experiential learning environment where they not only learn the latest marketing research techniques, they learn how to convert the findings into actionable intelligence;
• to provide an environment where new marketing research and analytics techniques will be developed, tested and verified;
• to enable students and professors, across a broad spectrum of disciplines, to collaborate on and complete a wide range of applied research endeavors; and
• to serve the local and national business communities by providing a facility with state-of-the-art tools in which businesses can successfully complete applied marketing research.”

“The University of Akron is grateful to the Suarez family for providing us with the opportunity to create yet another outstanding business education facility,” said UA College of Business Administration Dean Raj Aggarwal. “I believe that coupled with the College of Business Administration’s other institutes and centers, there is no similar comprehensive set of facilities and programs in the United States.”

Dr. Dale Lewison, director of the Suarez Labs:
"The Suarez Laboratories' mission is to blend marketing intelligence with marketing research to provide real-world opportunities and advantages to businesses, and UA students and faculty seeking to perform applied research, Lewison explains.

"Most businesses today have a wealth of data and research available to them, but they either don't know it exists or have not fully utilized what is available to them,"¯ he says. "The idea behind applied marketing research is to combine competitive intelligence, industry intelligence, domestic and global trends, consumer intelligence, and socio-environmental and economic factors with qualitative, quantitative and cognitive research, and then thoroughly understand the results via marketing analytics.

"While this idea is not new, the practice is catching on due to the technological resources available in the 21st century,"¯ Lewison adds. "The goal of applied marketing research is to take data and create useful information. This useful information is then converted into strategic knowledge "” which is actionable intelligence that companies can use in many ways."¯

Benjamin Suarez, a UA graduate, says the opportunity to establish the laboratories was a way to give something to the university community, and to the region's business community as well.

"I believe profitable sales are driven by a comprehensive understanding of the market and consumers. Because I have an undergraduate degree in psychology, I have always been interested in looking at the cognitive processes that go into purchase motivations, behaviors and actual decisions,"¯ Suarez says. "I donated the funding to create a facility that looks at marketing research in many traditional and new ways.

"My vision for the Suarez Applied Marketing Research Laboratories is four-fold: to provide students with an experiential learning environment where they not only learn the latest marketing research techniques, they learn how to convert the findings into actionable intelligence; to provide an environment where new marketing research and analytics techniques will be developed, tested and verified; to enable students and professors, across a broad spectrum of disciplines, to collaborate on and complete a wide range of applied research endeavors; and to serve the local and national business communities by providing a facility with state-of-the-art tools in which businesses can successfully complete applied marketing research."¯

"The University of Akron is grateful to the Suarez family for providing us with the opportunity to create yet another outstanding business education facility,"¯ says CBA Dean Raj Aggarwal. "I believe that coupled with the College of Business Administration's other institutes and centers, there is no similar comprehensive set of facilities and programs in the United States."¯

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