The Nostradamus of Marketing Comes to Fordham

Next week Fordham University’s Center for Positive Marketing will host a discussion with Faith Popcorn, “the Nostradamus of marketing.”

Popcorn, a best-selling author and "futurist," will share her predictions about a future shaped by the intersection of personal technologies, changing family composition, and data security.

“Flying into the Future with Faith Popcorn”
Wednesday, Oct. 22
6:30 p.m.
Room 3-03 | Fordham School of Law
150 West 62nd Street

Popcorn is the founder of the BrainReserve, a New York-based, future-focused marketing consultancy. She has successfully predicted social trends such as “cocooning,” forecasting the explosive growth of home delivery, home businesses, and home shopping.

She is the consultant for Fortune 500 companies including American Express, Campbell’s Soup, Johnson & Johnson, PepsiCo, Tylenol, and the United States Postal Service. She is also the author of several books, such as EVEolution: Understanding Women (Hyperion, 2001) and Dictionary of the Future (Hyperion, 2001).

Click here to reserve your seat.

For more information, contact Linda Purcell.

The event is sponsored by the Center for Positive Marketing, which unites industry professionals, academic researchers, and students for the goal of promoting the positive differences marketing can make in people’s lives.

— Joanna K. Mercuri

Positive Marketing Knowhow from the C-Suite

High fashion and flawless marketing make their way to Fordham on Wednesday, Oct. 2 when Fordham Schools of Business’ Center for Positive Marketing launches its "Marketing Lessons from the C-Suite" with Tony Spring, president and COO of Bloomingdale's. Spring will deliver a talk titled, "Inside the Brown Bag: What Makes Bloomingdale's Bloomingdale's." The event, to be held at the Lincoln Center Campus’ South Lounge, promises to be a packed house.

The series will bring successful business executives from a variety of sectors to hold forth on subjects that don't always full under the purview of their official title, said Dawn Lerman, Ph.D., associate dean of graduate business education and executive director of the center.

"Often it's the case that students tend to look at things in the silos of which they’re studying, but every particular business function is impacted by every other business function," said Lerman. "Marketing lessons don’t necessarily come from the marketing department, they can come from the COO, CIO, CFO, and of course the CEO—the lessons really can come from anywhere."

The backbone of a business education often requires that business functions be taught separately, said Lerman, but curriculum must also provide perspective on how those parts come together.

The series aims to mesh these functions via the perspective of individuals who have worked their way up to the executive suite of the chief officers—"The C-suite."

"C-suite executives view business holistically because they experience it that way firsthand," said Lerman. "The series will present people at the top who have found ways to manage their career to get there."

Here's the lineup...

Tony Spring, president and COO of Bloomingdale's will be speaking at Lincoln Center Campus on Wednesday, Oct. 2, 6 p.m. in the South Lounge.

Chris McWilton, president of U.S. Markets and former CFO of MasterCard, will be speaking at Lincoln Center Campus on Thursday, Oct. 17, 6 p.m. in McMahon 109.

Salman Amin, COO-North American Markets, S.C. Johnson and Son, will be speaking at LC on Wednesday, Oct. 30, 1:30 p.m., Room TBD.

John Osborn, President and CEO of BBDO New York will be speaking at the Rose Hill campus on Monday, Nov. 11, time and room TBD.

For more information contact Linda Purcell, 212-636-6115, lpurcell2@fordham.edu.

Center for Positive Marketing Seeks Papers

The Fordham Schools of Business’ Center for Positive Marketing is looking for submissions for its second annual conference for positive marketing, which will be held November 1-2 at the Lincoln Center campus. 

If you see marketing as an agent for positive influence in society and not simply a facilitator of the exchange of goods and services, and can demonstrate it in a paper that incorporates interdisciplinary research, your work could be considered for the “Best Positive Marketing Paper” award. 

The award carries a $1,000 cash prize and acceptance for publication in the Journal of Business Research.

The deadline for extended abstracts (1,000 words or less, not including references) of the papers is Monday, July 2, with decisions to follow by August 6. The deadline for full papers (following the acceptance of extended abstracts) is October 1.

Proposals can be submitted by creating an account at: http://fordham.bepress.com/cpm/ and submitting it through the “Author Corner” section at the bottom right.

For questions about the conference, contact Linda Purcell at Lpurcell2@fordham.edu.

For more information about the Center for Positive Marketing, please visit www.CenterforPositiveMarketing.org.

—Patrick Verel

Marketing Professor Wins Outstanding Teacher Award

Assistant Professor of Marketing Luke Kachersky, Ph.D., has been awarded the 2011 Outstanding Marketing Teacher of the Year Award by the Academy of Marketing Science (AMS).

The academy cited Kachersky for his teaching, use of technology in the classroom, and assessments of student learning based on recommendations from peers, students and administrators.

“Luke does not just teach his students in the sense of imparting knowledge,” said Dawn Lerman, Ph.D., associate professor and area chair of marketing. “He also seeks to reach them and to engage them in ways that will benefit their classroom learning but also serve them outside of the classroom.”

This is not the first accolade Kachersky has received for his teaching abilities. He was honored in 2010 with the Cura Personalis Award for challenging students while providing them support to excel. He also earned the Marketing Area Teaching Excellence Award for 2009.

Among his many—and perhaps less official, noteworthy achievements—Kachersky has won praise from his students for his approach to teaching marketing research. That staple of marketing programs is, said Lerman, “notoriously feared by students and one that yields lower than average evaluations, regardless of the instructor.”

Kachersky reverses the teaching progression so that students learn data analysis before research design, allowing them to understand and appreciate nuances of the entire research process. He also incorporates social media into his courses to provide students with an understanding of how such media provide market insights.

“Ours is a dynamic field, perhaps the most among all courses of study in higher education,” Kachersky said. “We, as marketing professors, are charged with an insurmountable task of making sense of a field that changes continuously. If we embrace the process and the burden of struggling with this task, we can deliver much value to our students, enabling them to confront similarly unresolvable issues in their lives and careers.”

In addition to his teaching load, Kachersky is a busy scholar with two papers scheduled for publication this year: “Do Moniker Maladies Afflict Name Letter Brands? A Dual Process Theory of Name Letter Branding and Avoidance Effects” in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology; and “The Role of Wireless Service Provider Trust on Consumer Acceptance of SMS Advertising,” co-authored with his Fordham colleague, Assistant Professor of Marketing Sertan Kabadayi, Ph.D., in the International Journal of Internet Marketing and Advertising.

Kachersky is also one of the driving forces, along with Lerman and Associate Professor of Marketing Marcia Flicker, Ph.D., behind Fordham’s newest research center, the Center for Positive Marketing. The center studies marketing from the demand (consumers’) as opposed to the supply (marketers’) perspective.

Kachersky joined the Fordham business faculty in 2008 after receiving his doctorate from Baruch College of the City University of New York. He will receive his award, and make a presentation on his classroom success, in May at the AMS Annual Conference in Coral Gables, Fla.

--Syd Steinhardt