Giacomo Family Memorial Scholarship

While teaching marketing students is an important daily motivator for longtime Georgia Southern University professor Dr. Mary Hazeldine, ensuring their future is also a top priority. Shortly after joining the faculty of the College of Business Administration as the department chair of marketing in 1995, Hazeldine established the Giacomo Family Memorial Scholarship. The Giacomo scholarship is awarded annually to junior level marketing majors with a 3.0 minimum GPA.

Hazeldine named the scholarship in memory of her family — a close-knit clan from Krebs, Oklahoma. “I wanted to recognize the Italian side of my family. I grew up in an Italian settlement with aunts, uncles, cousins and my grandparents. All of the family was born in Krebs except my grandfather, who moved to the U.S. from Costa Leone, Italy when he was 14-years-old,” she said.

Hazeldine’s varied career has taken her around the United States as a teacher and business owner. She received her B.S. and M.A. degrees from Oklahoma State University, and her MBA and Ph.D. in marketing from the University of Texas at Arlington. While earning her degrees, Hazeldine owned a Deck the Halls franchise, a One Hour Martinizing store and was also a buyer for the housewares division of Federated Department Stores in Dallas, Texas.

During her career at Georgia Southern, Hazeldine was appointed COBA’s associate dean in 2006 and returned to faculty as a professor of marketing in 2010. Some of her other roles include serving as a reviewer of the Journal of Marketing Theory and Practice, and the faculty advisor of Mu Kappa Tau, the College’s marketing honor society.

In the classroom, Hazeldine inspires students by providing a valuable learning tool — a unique perspective from her own personal marketing experiences in the corporate world. Hazeldine makes learning fun in her e-commerce class, and for a recent project, she divided the class into teams. “The students selected a Fortune 500 company to research and then completed presentations. For example, some of these companies included Intel, Amazon, Yahoo and Oracle,” she said, describing the varied aspects of marketing taught in her class. “I tell students that marketing is everywhere. Every company needs marketing.”

For Hazeldine these words ring true. She has proven that marketing is not only a message, but a legacy.