Faculty: Marketing
Marketing: Faculty and Research
The ability to understand consumer needs and to design products and services around these needs is critical for success. Peter Drucker famously said that “the purpose of business is to create and keep a customer.” Our marketing faculty are focused on creating and disseminating knowledge that goes to the heart of this process and span all critical aspects of marketing in research and practice.
Some of our faculty study consumer behavior by mapping the customer journey from the search for product information to how experiences are encoded to disentangling the psychological underpinnings of consumer preferences. They use methodologies such as lab and field experiments and econometric and machine learning techniques to analyze different kinds of data to understand consumers’ social interactions, and response to different pricing, advertising, and messaging strategies. This research generates not only important insights into different marketing phenomena, but also implications for product innovation, loyalty programs, and marketplace performance.
Our clinical and adjunct faculty bring advanced degrees and a wealth of industry experience to the classroom. They provide a means by which cutting-edge marketing practice is effectively transmitted to our students in areas such as UX, gaming, and AI. They operate on the cutting-edge of our discipline and communicate their exciting insights inside and outside the classroom.
We welcome students and scholars from everywhere to further our knowledge of this amazingly rich and important area of business. We invite you to learn more about our faculty by exploring the content on this page and the linked profiles below.
— S. Siddarth, Department Chair and Professor of Marketing
Full-Time Faculty
Diane Badame specializes in the fields of marketing management, customer satisfaction and new product development. She currently serves as the Academic Director of the Master of Science in Marketing Program.
Eva Buechel is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at the University of Southern California. Her research interests focus on the psychological processes that shape consumer judgments, decisions and behaviors. Specifically, she examines how current experiential states affect cognitions and how these in turn determine consumers’ estimations of utility and value.
Miriam Burgos specializes in multi-cultural marketing, brand management, and sales management. Prior to joining USC, Professor Burgos worked in the consumer packaged goods industry with Procter & Gamble and Colgate Palmolive where she developed expertise in how a multi-national corporation successfully takes a product to market in a global economy from initial concept to branding, and ultimately to consumers' homes and workplaces. She worked in Procter & Gamble's multicultural business development organization (MBDO) and also has experience in marketing strategy, cause-marketing, and small-business marketing plan development.
Luca Cascio Rizzo studies how language shapes consumer behavior. Specifically, his research examines how the words, the vocal cues, or the body gestures communicators use influence others. To investigate this, he employs a multimethod approach, combining automated text, visual, and audioanalysis in the field with controlled experiments.
Luca's research has been published in leading academic journals including Journal of Consumer Research and Journal of Marketing, and covered by popular press outlets such as Harvard Business Review and Fast Company. In 2024, Luca received the Rising Star Award from the American Marketing Association.
Courtesy + Joint Appointments
Robert V. Kozinets is the Jayne and Hans Hufschmid Chair of Strategic Public Relations at USC Annenberg, a position he shares with the USC Marshall School of Business. Previously, he has been a marketing professor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Wisconsin School of Business, and York University’s Schulich School of Business. He has been widely recognized as an educator, winning the coveted Sidney Levy Teaching Award at the Kellogg School and the Seymour Schulich Teaching Award in Canada. He has also taught courses and classes in Sydney, Istanbul, Rio de Janeiro, Dublin, Bergen (Norway), Glasgow, Paris, Geneva, Auckland, and Tokyo.
Norbert Schwarz is an expert in consumer judgment and decision making. He investigates how subtle contextual influences shape how we make sense of the world, with downstream consequences for consumer behavior, health behavior, and political preferences. Schwarz has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the German National Academy of Science, and the Academia Europaea (pan-European academy of arts and sciences). He serves on the editorial boards of leading journals in marketing, psychology, and the social sciences. Prior to joining USC he was the Charles Horton Cooley Collegiate Professor of psychology, business, and social research at the University of Michigan.
Daniel Sokol focuses address the interface of law and business interface across a number of dimensions: antitrust, data breaches, corporate governance, compliance, innovation, M&A, technological transformation, and platforms. He is among the top 10 most cited antitrust law professors in the past five years. He has edited 10 books and his articles have appeared in a variety of journals: Strategic Management Journal, Journal of Law and Economics, Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review, and various law and economics journals.
Part-Time + Adjunct Faculty
Elena Hansen is a social media marketing expert and has worked with high profile brands and public figures to establish their unique position online. Elena founded SWIM Social, a full service social media agency, in 2015 and has since grown a highly skilled team and global client base. She relates her marketing approach to water - fluid and always evolving - and is passionate about using social media as a tool for connection and cultural impact. Elena’s goal is to empower students to harness their inherent knowledge of social media platforms and apply a strategic approach that will be valuable in any conversation and career path.
Amy Luca is Adjunct Professor of Digital Marketing at the USC Marshall School of Business EMBA Programs. She is a graduate of the Marshall School of Business Global EMBA Program (GEMBA), Class IV 2007-2009.
Emeriti Faculty
James Ellis was appointed Dean of the Marshall School of Business in 2007. Previously, he served as the University's Vice Provost for Globalization, Marshall's Vice Dean for External Relations, and Marshall's Associate Dean for the Undergraduate Program. As an instructor, he has been named professor of the year by many organizations and in 2003 received Marshall's Golden Apple Award and Teaching Has No Boundaries Award. Professor Ellis continues to teach Marshall's invitation-only Freshman Leadership Colloquium each fall. Dean Ellis serves on boards at the Capital Group and Mercury Insurance as well as a number of non-profit boards.
Valerie Folkes studies consumers' responses to negative information and attributions for service and product performance. Her research has been widely published, including in the Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Consumer Psychology, and Journal of Marketing. She serves on the editorial review board of the Journal of Consumer Research, the Journal of Consumer Psychology and Journal of Marketing. She is an Associate Editor for the Journal of Consumer Research and was an Area Editor for the Journal of Consumer Psychology. Professor Folkes served as president of the Association for Consumer Research in 2001, and is a Fellow of the Consumer Psychology Division of the American Psychological Association
Debbie MacInnis is the Charles L. and Ramona I. Hilliard Professor of Business Administration and Emerita Professor of the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California.
RESEARCH + PUBLICATIONS
The marketing faculty in USC Marshall is dedicated to discovering new knowledge for our discipline through rigorous peer-reviewed research. We publish academic articles that yield meaningful implications for managerial practice, public policy, and scientific discovery. Members of our faculty are sought-out thought leaders in every arena of marketing and hold prestigious editorial positions at the field’s leading journals.
Consumers lose more weight when they log their food consumption more consistently, yet they face challenges in doing so. We investigate how the modality of food logging—whether people record what they eat by taking photos versus writing text—affects their anticipated and actual logging experience and behavior. We find that consumers are more likely to adopt and anticipate better experiences with photo-based food logging tools over text-based tools. However, in a weeklong field study, these expectations reveal themselves to be inaccurate; once participants start logging, they find taking photos (versus writing text) to be more difficult, log less of what they eat, and are less likely to continue using the logging tool. These findings contribute to existing research on how people track goal progress, as well as persistence with and dis-adoption of products. Moreover, our findings provide insights into what might increase the use of products that encourage healthy eating.
FACULTY POSITIONS