Community

Suarez Corporation Industries is involved in the community. Ben and Nancy Suarez and the Suarez associates are known in Stark County for their support of local and national organizations. From the United Way to disaster relief, SCI associates are always willing to help those in need. This spirit of giving makes SCI a truly special place.
Charity Drives

Ben and Nancy Suarez’s philanthropic efforts on behalf of women, particularly breast cancer research and women’s shelters, give hope to thousands in need and inspire their associates to do the same.

SCI associates regularly participate in charity drives, including the American Cancer Society’s Relay for Life and Making Strides Against Breast Cancer, the Make-A-Wish Foundation, and Akron Children’s Hospital’s annual fundraiser. Our associates support each event by selling candy bars, raffle tickets, cookie dough, popcorn, flower bulbs and by collecting spare change, as well as participating in the events.

Suarez Labs Open at the University of Akron

In November 2008, the University of Akron celebrated the opening of the Benjamin and Nancy Suarez Applied Marketing Research Laboratories at its location on the fifth floor of UofA’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 Suarez, a UA graduate and founder of SCI, 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 University of Akron 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.”