The Vanderbilt PhD in Marketing is designed to prepare students for an intellectually rewarding career in academia. The Marketing PhD equips students to carry out original research in the field of marketing—going beyond the MBA program, which communicates basic principles of managerial behavior. Current faculty research interests include such topics as satisfaction, consumer decision making, advertising and emotions, post-purchase consumer behavior, radically new products, preference development, and brand symbolism.
The Marketing PhD Program at Vanderbilt is small and selective, offering close faculty interaction and supervision. We seek students of high intellectual ability whose scholarly objectives fit well with the current research topics and activities of area faculty. Because of its small size, the program affords a great deal of flexibility for each student to develop a course of study to match his or her individual interests.
Students graduate with a solid grounding in the major disciplines underlying the scholarly study of marketing. Marketing PhD students at Vanderbilt critically evaluate current marketing and consumer behavior models, become proficient in advanced statistical analysis techniques, and gain experience developing new research topics.
