Courses Taught
Marketing Management (MBA); Consumer Behavior (PhD, MBA, BBA)
Critical Business Skills for Success: Marketing, and How You Decide: The Science of Human Decision Making, video lecture series produced for The Great Courses, a company that claims to sell the “best of the best” in college-level lectures given by professors selected “exclusively for their ability to teach.”
Teaching Philosophy
Bad marketing, I like to tell my students, is hard to distinguish from throwing big bags of money out a window. Good marketing is rooted in strategic thinking. This requires an intimate understanding of your customers, who they are and what they value. Marketing is not blindly grinding through the 4 Ps. Any business that tries to set a price, for example, by surveying the competition and computing elasticities without being able to precisely identify who their customers are and what they value might as well be throwing darts at a wall. Marketers who make tactical decisions without a clear strategy are almost guaranteed to run afoul of Peter Drucker’s famous dictum: doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.
My goal as a teacher is to help my students think strategically about marketing problems. I am not seeking to provide them with solutions to common marketing problems. Instead, I hope to teach my students what questions they should be asking themselves to solve any problem they encounter. And the first questions in business, as my students are all eventually sick of hearing me tell them, are always: Who is your customer? What do they value? How can you give that to them better than the competition?
Teaching Awards
- MBA Teaching Excellence Award (bestowed by students), Goizueta Business School, 2010, 2011 & 2016
- One of “The World’s Best 40 B-School Profs Under the Age of 40,” Poets & Quants, 2011