Meet Boston Questrom’s First Female Dean, Susan Fournier
What does it take to be the first female dean at your business school? It takes a lot of experience, know-how, and pioneering research. That’s precisely why Boston University’s Questrom School of Business choose Susan Fournier to be the first female to lead the school. After 13 years as a marketing and management professor at BU and as a leading international expert on brand marketing, she was an obvious choice.
“She brings a remarkable tool kit of experience and knowledge to this role—and a genuine connection to the students, faculty, and staff, who are the heart of Questrom,” Jean Morrison, BU Provost and Chief Academic Officer, told BU Today. “I am excited to welcome her to this role and to follow her success as she guides Questrom to continued excellence as a leading global business school.”
Meet Susan Fournier
Susan Fournier, Questrom Professor in Management, will become the new dean of the Questrom School of Business, effective August 27. Fournier is an international expert in brand marketing / Photo by Dan Watkins
Dean Fournier is well known at Boston University and in the field of marketing. She’s credited with pioneering brand relationships; a marketing field that explores the emotional relationships between consumers and brands. Fournier has written two acclaimed books on branding as well as participating in numerous best-selling Harvard case studies. Most recently, Fournier’s soon-to-be-published paper examines the pitfalls of celebrity-based branding, focusing on Martha Stewart’s 14-year career.
Fournier’s research has received several awards including the JRC Long-Term Contribution Award from the Association for Consumer Research as well as Emerald Publishing’s Citation of Excellence Award for the top 50 articles in management. Other awards include being ranked among the Top 10 percent of authors on SSRN regarding all-time downloads. She also claims over 20,000 Google Scholar citations with five works garnering over 1,000 citations each.
On her new role, Fournier sees a strong correlation between research specialties and her position as dean. They’re both about relationships.
“I have deep knowledge in the psychology and sociology of relationships, how they develop, how they fall apart, what kind of flavors they come in,” she says. “The whole point of what I do is looking at why people connect with things, what role brands, products, organizations have for people in their lives. It’s not about selling a product, it’s about understanding people’s lives … and trying to help them.”
Beyond her research, Fournier is a celebrated professor with over 24 years of experience in academia covering the gambit from teaching undergraduate courses to teaching in MBA and Executive classrooms at such prestigious schools as Harvard Business School, Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business, and Questrom.
Before her new role as Dean, Fournier served as the Senior Associate Dean of Faculty & Research and Faculty Director of the Questrom MBA and Doctoral programs. During that time, she hired 22 tenure-track research faculty and 18 non-tenure track faculty across disciplines and departments.
Outside of academia, Fournier worked as a market research consultant for companies such as Polaroid Corp., Altria, IBM, Coca-Cola, and Chick-fil-A, according to the Boston Globe.
What To Expect
“I will be the champion of the Questrom School of Business brand,” Fournier tells BU Today. “I will be looking out to make sure all the decisions we make are on brand and are going to build our equity as a preeminent academic institution, from every person we hire to every course we develop to every institute we endow.”
Fournier has many exciting plans for Questrom. Not only will she work to increase interdisciplinary programming, but she’ll also ensure Questrom’s financial security and aligning coursework with student and employer needs. And her work has already begun breaking down outmoded silos in favor of interdisciplinary programming. She has helped eliminate boundaries in hiring, interfaces, and education in general.
“I’m trying to further establish our reputation as a preeminent research and teaching institution and develop our reputation for research that matters and faculty who care,” Fournier says. “We need strong partnerships with industry and organizations both to provide data for research that matters but also to be in partnership with us in the development of courses and projects that students would work on for hands-on learning. I have a stakeholder perspective from having worked and lived on the other side.”
Also, Fournier plans to focus on online and experiential learning, global partnerships, and practical and pragmatic research particularly in focus areas such as health, social impact, and digital technology. She sees these areas of the economy as important spaces to “double down” by hiring more faculty, building research institutes, and implementing new programs and concentrations.
Fournier told The Daily Free Press that she also plans to build more partnerships between faculty and research tracks in those areas. “We already have what I would consider to be a fantastic culture, but let’s further enable the collaborative culture, and in particular … interdisciplinary work and ideas and projects and partnerships,” she says.
High Expectations
As for what the Questrom School can expect its new dean? It’s an exciting time for the school, and University President Robert A. Brown gives her his enthusiastic support.
“Susan assumes the role of the dean of the Questrom School of Business during an exciting time for the school, for business education, and the University,” Brown told BU Today. “I look forward to working with her to continue the journey of increasing the quality and impact of the school’s education and research programs.”
And Fournier is excited as well, not just about being the first female dean at Questrom, but about being a great dean in general.
“We’ve never had a woman dean, and it’s definitely notable and wonderful,” Fournier told The Daily Free Press. “But I also would say that at the same time, I want to be known as a great dean, not first and foremost as a woman who happened to get a dean role. I’m really looking forward to the day when that doesn’t even have to be a question anymore.”
Find the original school press release about the Susan Fournier appointment here.
MIT Talks About Nike’s Kaepernick Gamble
Shortly after sports manufacturing giant decided to bring the continually Colin Kaepernick, conversation surrounding the company exploded. For many, the move came off as a huge gamble. MIT Sloan argues, however, that it was all about brand authenticity.
In a recent piece published by the MIT Sloan Newsroom, Senior Lecturer and Research Scientist Renée Gosline, says, “It’s hall-of-fame-level type advertising. Not to mention the signal it sends given the current climate.”
“People think branding or marketing is to sell the most amount of products to the greatest number of people. Perhaps if you’re thinking widgets,” she says. “But in actuality in order for a brand to be really enduring, it has to have a point of view, it has to have a personality, it has to have authenticity. By definition then, it needs to take a stand, and some stands are less controversial than others. But it needs to stand for something.”
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Fellow MIT Sloan Senior Lecturer and former ESPN Director of Social Media Marketing Ben Shields also adds, “The timing is obviously a well-intentioned decision, and it also reflects a need for marketing campaigns in today’s network culture, to get people talking. That’s precisely what this campaign is designed to do.”
One day after the announcement, which was made during the same year that Nike agreed to an eight-year deal to make the NFL’s uniforms, generated an estimated $43 million in exposure, according to Apex Marketing Group. Part of that, potentially, lends itself to the vagueness of the messaging.
Sharmila Chatterjee, a Senior Lecturer in Marketing at MIT Sloan, also adds, “Nike wants to support ‘be who you want to be, just do it,’ if that is the interpretation it is taking, then Kaepernick connotes that. If Nike wants to support that cause, i.e., ‘stand by your convictions’ cause, there’s a brand fit and authenticity here. By doing this there’s a way to increase the brand credibility of Nike. There’s a match here, it just so happens that in this case the actions of the celebrity or the spokesperson, is emotionally charged.”
On how this could potentially look down the road, Gosline seems optimistic, arguing that “history has a tendency to sanitize activists.”
“People forget that at the moment, they were raked across the coals. I think you might find this is what is going to happen with Colin Kaepernick in this particular case.”
You can read more about the advertisement reaction here and check out the aforementioned ad below.
Top 5 San Francisco Marketing MBA Programs
Elmer Wheeler of the Tested Selling Institute famously advised would-be product-pushers to “sell the sizzle, not the steak.” Wheeler’s adage simply explains how marketing often has less do with leveraging a product’s marketplace position than it does about the subtle art of seduction. And what better way to become Don Juan or Juanita of the boardroom than to get yourself a Marketing MBA.
Although local draconian housing laws combined with an influx of indifferent techies have largely driven out the counter-cultural element that defined San Francisco, the Bay Area is still a hotspot for folks who “think different.” The natural splendor of the region, surrounded by glorious Pacific Coast beach, hiking trails at Point Reyes, and the dry flat Central Valley directly west, is also hard to top.
We took the liberty of surveying the top 5 San Francisco Marketing MBA programs for you:
UC Davis Graduate School of Management
UC Davis offers an MBA concentration in marketing that prepares graduates for careers in Brand Management and Direct Marketing; Product Development; Public Relations and Advertising; Market Research and Marketing Consulting. The concentration emphasizes the development of new products, “conducting market research, planning advertising and promotion programs, creating marketing strategies, providing superior customer service, understanding e-commerce, developing profitable pricing strategies and brand management.”
University of San Francisco School of Management
USF’s Marketing MBA teaches students how to “build competitive advantage in the global marketplace” and run a “successful customer-driven organization” through a comprehensive understanding of market segmentation, competitive analysis, pricing strategies, public relations, advertising and distribution channels. USF graduates have gone on to upper management positions in the fields of Market Research, Sales, Advertising, Brand Management, General Management and Management Consulting.
San Francisco State University College of Business
SFSU’s MBA Emphasis in Marketing teaches students how to harness a “blend of creativity and analysis” in order to give their target market the “right combination of product, price, place and promotion.” SFSU gives students an opportunity to explore a wide variety of marketing applications: advertising, branding, channel management, customer relationship management, data analytics, marketing research, pricing, public relations and sales. SFSU marketing graduates have gone on to work for Apple, Clif Bar, Clorox, HP, Kaiser Permanente and Samsung, among others.
San Jose State University’s Lucas Graduate School of Business
SJSU’s Marketing Concentration was designed to “spark student innovation and provide multi-disciplinary opportunities through an academically challenging curriculum“ that focuses on “the business functions concerned with market definition and objectives, product or service development, customer segmentation and product positioning.” SJSU Marketing graduates go on to careers as market and survey researchers; product managers; product marketers; marketing analysts; sales representatives; retail managers; direct marketers; channel and distribution managers; marketing communications and web marketers.
Santa Clara University’s Leavey School of Business
SCU’s Leavey School of Business offers a Marketing degree that emphasizes “the latest in web and mobile marketing [and] quantitative methods for gathering precise, useful data” so your brand can “connect with customers and build brand recognition.” SCU offers student internships at large area companies like Google and Facebook, as well as a number of study abroad opportunities. SCU Marketing graduates go on to positions within the high-tech, financial services, retail, real estate consulting and nonprofit fields. Examples include: retail advertising, sales, new product development, market research, Internet marketing and supply chain management.
Columbia Alum Advises Millennials on Getting Ahead in their Careers
Columbia Business School recently published an article by Winged Keel Group President Alexander Tuff ’03 that offers millennials useful tips for navigating decisions that “will affect what you’ll do and where you’ll live for your entire career.”
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Business and Political Strategy Aren’t So Different, According to Columbia
There may be a fine line between how successful business and political campaigns lay out strategies, according to a new Columbia Business School article.
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Lehigh Women in Business Conference Focuses on Personal Brands
Mary Ellen Alu recently published a report on Lehigh College of Business and Economics’ blog on a recent lecture that focused on building effective personal brands. Continue reading…
