Introduction to Marketing

Barbara E. Kahn returned to The Wharton School in January 2011 to serve as the Patty and Jay H. Baker Professor of Marketing and the Director of the Jay H. Baker Retailing Center. Prior to rejoining Wharton, Barbara served for three and a half years as the Dean and Schein Family Chair Professor of Marketing at the School of Business Administration, University of Miami, Coral Gables, Florida. While Dean at the University of Miami, she launched new global initiatives and academic programs, attracted top faculty from some of the world’s leading business schools to enhance the caliber of the school’s research and teaching, and established new partnerships with the business community. All of these initiatives helped the School rise significantly in the ratings. She also established the Global Business Forum at the University of Miami which brought over 1000 leading business executives and professionals to the campus. Barbara is an internationally recognized scholar on variety seeking, brand loyalty, retail assortment issues and patient decision-making whose research provides marketing managers with a better understanding of the consumer choice process. She has published more than 50 articles in leading academic journals. Between 1982 and 2006, she was the world’s seventh most published author of articles in the most prestigious marketing journals. She is the author of the The Shopping Revolution: How Successful Retailers Win Customers in an Era of Endless Disruption (Wharton Digital Press), Global Brand Power: Leveraging Branding for Long-Term Growth and a co-author of Grocery Revolution: The New Focus on the Consumer, a book that chronicled the dramatically changing supermarket industry and outlined how consumers make choices within the supermarket. She received her PhD, MBA and MPhil degrees from Columbia University, and a BA in English Literature from the University of Rochester.