Ph.D. in Business Administration - Marketing

Penn State marketing faculty members are interested in working with prospective graduate students who show the potential to become top scholars in the field. The research performance of the department is consistently ranked in the top 20 marketing departments in the U.S. Over half of the faculty serve on the editorial boards of top marketing journals and many have won prestigious awards for their research contributions, as is noted below. This research vibrancy and energy carries over to the faculty's work with graduate students, which is explained in greater detail below. The marketing faculty also work closely with two centers of excellence in the Smeal College of Business; the Institute for the Study of Business Markets (ISBM) and the Center for Digital Transformation.

Program Overview

The goal of the Ph.D. program in marketing is to prepare doctoral students to become productive researchers and teachers at top research universities. Students work closely with faculty to identify areas of interest and can choose to specialize in one or more of the three core areas of marketing—psychological foundations of consumer behavior, marketing management and strategy, and marketing models and quantitative methods.

• Psychological Foundations of Consumer Behavior—How do consumers combine information about products to formulate their expectations and make choices? How do consumers' temporary moods and personality influence those decision-making processes? How can advertising change consumer preferences and brand perceptions? What are the public policy implications associated with various forms of marketing communications? In particular, this area focuses on applying theories and methods of cognitive and social psychology to understanding consumer behavior.
  
  Faculty members: Hans Baumgartner, Jennifer Chang Coupland, Marv Goldberg, Meg Meloy, Bill Ross
• Marketing Management and Strategy—How do managers turn marketing information into marketing strategy? How do companies develop relationships with distributors? What organizational structures contribute to the success of a sales force? Such questions are studied using theories and methods from industrial psychology, political science, strategic management, and organizational behavior.
  
  Faculty members: Bill Ross, Rajdeep Grewal, Ujwal Kayande, Qiong Wang, Matt Aistrich
• Marketing Models and Quantitative Methods—How can we mathematically calibrate the impact of marketing actions on consumer choice? How can we represent competitive positions of brands? What is the most efficient sequence of questions to use for recommending a product? What is the optimal pricing strategy for a new industrial product? How should a company react to a competitor's price change? How can a pharmaceutical company optimally structure its new product pipeline? These are some of the questions addressed by faculty members working in this area. This emphasis area uses techniques from statistics, economics, management science, and operations research to develop quantitative models to solve marketing problems.
  
  Faculty members: Wayne DeSarbo, Min Ding, Peter Ebbes, Duncan Fong, Ujwal Kayande, John Liechty, Gary Lilien, Arvind Rangaswamy

Financial Support and Awards

Students who are admitted to the Ph.D. program in marketing receive financial support in the form of a tuition waiver and a monthly stipend for up to 5 years, conditional upon satisfactory progress in the program.

Scholarship and research monies are also available on a competitive basis through the college. Travel funds are available to doctoral students who will be presenting research papers at professional conferences.

Finally, in order to expedite dissertation research, funds may also be obtained by submitting proposals to the eBusiness Research Center (eBRC) and to the Institute for the Study of Business Markets (ISBM). Outstanding candidates with an interest in the area of Business-to-Business Marketing may receive a fellowship (for up to a five-year period) from ISBM with an amount up to $10,000 in addition to the standard graduate assistantship awarded at the university.

Each summer one Ph.D. student is selected to attend the American Marketing Association Doctoral Consortium, where he or she has the opportunity to network with colleagues across the country. Two students are also chosen to present and discuss their research at the Haring Symposium, an event sponsored by the Big Ten.

Faculty Achievements

We pride ourselves on having one of the best marketing faculties in the country. Faculty members are actively engaged in research and contribute frequently to the most prestigious journals in the field. View a summary of journal articles and books published by marketing faculty during the last six years. (190kb)*Acrobat.

Faculty members have also been the recipients of competitive grants from organizations such as the Marketing Science Institute, the National Science Foundation, the United States Department of Agriculture, and the United States Marine Corps Research University.

Smeal researchers are highly respected members of the marketing community as shown by their representation on the editorial boards of the most important journals in the field:

• Journal of Consumer Research: Hans Baumgartner (past Associate Editor), Marv Goldberg
  
• Journal of Marketing: Wayne DeSarbo, Rajdeep Grewal, Bill Ross
  
• Journal of Marketing Research: Wayne DeSarbo
  
• Marketing Science: Wayne DeSarbo, Gary Lilien (Area Editor), Arvind Rangaswamy (Area Editor)

Faculty members have also received many awards for their contributions to the field. A few examples are the following:

• Hans Baumgartner was awarded the 2004 Excellence in Research Award by the American Marketing Association's Global Marketing group. He was also a finalist for the 2002 Paul Green award at the Journal of Marketing Research.
  
• Wayne DeSarbo is a past recipient of the Raymond B. Cattell Award in Multivariate Experimental Psychology for outstanding research contributions and has served on the Nobel Prize Nomination Committee.
  
• Marvin Goldberg is a past president of the Association for Consumer Research and was named a Fellow of the Society of Consumer Psychology in 2003.
  
• Rajdeep Grewal was the winner of the 2003 Journal of Consumer Psychology Young Contributor Award and received an Honorable Mention in the prestigious Marketing Science Institute/Journal of Marketing competition on "Linking Marketing to Financial Performance and Firm Value". He was also selected to participate in the Marketing Science Institute's 2003 Young Scholars Program.
  
• John Liechty was a finalist for the 1999 American Statistical Association Savage Award Dissertation Prize and the 2001 Paul E. Green Award at the Journal of Marketing Research.
  
• Gary Lilien has three honorary Ph.D. degrees from universities in Belgium and the United Kingdom and is also a past winner of the Alpha Kappa Psi Award for Outstanding Article in the Journal of Marketing.
  
• Ujwal Kayande won the 1998 Donald Lehmann Award for best dissertation-based article published in the Journal of Marketing Research and/or the Journal of Marketing.

Quality of the Doctoral Students

Many excellent Ph.D. students have graduated from our program over the years or are currently working towards their Ph.D. degree. Some recent examples include:

• Girish Mallapragada has accepted a position as an Assistant Professor at Kenan Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina starting July 2007.
  
• Selin Atalay has accepted a position as an Assistant Professor at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey beginning Fall 2007.
• Joonwook Park will become an Assistant Professor at the Cox Business School at Southern Methodist University starting August 2007.
• Sanjay Rao has accepted an offer of employment at Miami University's Richard T. Farmer School of Business beginning in 2007.
• Crystal Scott is currently an Assistant Professor of Marketing at The University of Michigan, Dearborn.
• Melea Press accepted a position at the University of Wyoming. She began January 2008 as an Assistant Professor of Sustainable Business Practices and Marketing.
• Rui Wang will join Peking University in the Fall of 2008 as an Assistant Professor in the Guanghua School of Management.
  

Some students have received prestigious awards for best dissertation and/or dissertation-based article published in top marketing journals.

• Christophe van den Bulte won an Honorable Mention in the 1998 John A. Howard AMA Doctoral Dissertation Award competition.
• Glenn Christensen was a co-winner of the Best Competitive Paper Award at the 2000 Association for Consumer Research conference in Salt Lake City.
• Partha Krishnamurthy won an Honorable Mention in the 2000 Robert Ferber Award competition given for the best interdisciplinary article based on a recent doctoral dissertation.

Past students have accepted academic job offers from top business schools such as the Wharton School (Christophe van den Bulte) at the University of Pennsylvania, and University of Texas at Austin (Raji Srinivasan), among others.

How to apply

For more information contact:

Professor Duncan Fong
Ph.D. Coordinator
Department of Marketing
Smeal College of Business
The Pennsylvania State University
456 Business Building
University Park, PA 16802-3603

Telephone: 814-863-3541
Fax: 814-865-3015
E-mail: i2v@psu.edu