Marketing Matters

Barbara E. Kahn is Patty and Jay H. Baker Professor of Marketing at the Wharton School at University of Pennsylvania. She is an internationally recognized scholar on retailing, variety-seeking, brand loyalty, product assortment and design, and consumer and patient decision-making. She has published more than 80 articles in leading academic journals. She is the author of Global Brand Power: Leveraging Branding for Long-Term Growth and The Shopping Revolution (revised and updated): How Retailers Succeed in an Era of Endless Disruption Accelerated by Covid-19, and coauthor of Grocery Revolution: The New Focus on the Consumer. She has been featured in CNN, CNBC, Forbes, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, NPR, Vox, Politico, and the Hidden Brain Podcast. She also served as Director of the Jay H. Baker Retailing Center and as Executive Director of Marketing Science Institute (MSI). She is the former Dean of the University of Miami’s  Herbert School of Business and former Vice Dean of the Wharton undergraduate program. She was elected as a Fellow for both Association for Consumer Research (ACR) and Society for Consumer Psychology (SCP). Barbara received her PhD, MBA, and MPhil from Columbia University, and her BA from University of Rochester.

Americus Reed II is the Whitney M. Young Jr. Professor of Marketing at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, where he has served on faculty since 2000. An avid fitness enthusiast, part-time drummer, and tireless educator, Americus’s primary research and consulting areas are in brand equity and identity loyalty — the study of creating and fostering “brand communities” that transcend the utilitarian aspects of products to actualize iconic levels of symbolic identity and self-expression, connect to deep levels of emotional and social affiliation, and cultivate lifelong relationships with intermediate customers and end consumers. In 2005, his academic work in this area received honorable mention for the prestigious Robert Ferber Award for academic impact in the Journal of Consumer Research (JCR) and in 2009 he received JCR’s Best Paper Award. Americus describes the power of branding in this TEDx conversation. He has authored more than 50 articles, book chapters, and cases on the topic. He has been featured on CNN, CNBC, Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, Huffington Post, The New York Times, NPR, the Hidden Brain podcast, and Knowledge at Wharton. He hosts a podcast called Marketing Matters, which airs live on Wednesdays on Wharton’s Sirius XM Channel 132 Business Radio. He teaches customer analysis, branding, and consumer psychology to undergraduate, graduate, doctoral, and executive students.