Marketing is concerned with decisions that relate to a firm’s customers, competitors, and network of partners including channel members and promotion agencies. It focuses on how customers make choices and how companies ought to design products, services, and programs to satisfy customer needs. Given the breadth of marketing decisions, marketing scholars study a variety of marketing issues, ranging from marketing strategy to product development and consumer decision making to customer satisfaction. The field of marketing is truly interdisciplinary, drawing theories and methods from disciplines such as economics, psychology, sociology, and statistics, among others.

The PhD program in marketing is designed to provide students with the skills necessary for a successful research and teaching career. We train students to identify and define interesting and important marketing phenomena and develop the necessary methodological tools to investigate these phenomena with original research. As part of this training, students take a common set of “breadth” courses as well as “depth” courses tailored to their specific interests. In addition, students learn by working with faculty members on joint research, conduct a series of original research projects, and assist in the teaching of marketing courses.

PhD students tend to specialize in studying either (i) firm-level behaviors/strategies by conducting surveys, modeling archival data, developing qualitative studies or (ii) consumer-level behaviors by conducting laboratory and/or field experiments, econometric modeling of scanner and online data, and using qualitative approaches. PhD students in marketing must have a strong interest in marketing phenomena, and an aptitude for developing methodological skills in probability and statistics (including multivariate statistics), and econometrics. Because interaction with faculty mentors is an essential component of doctoral training, students in our program become involved in faculty research upon their arrival. Faculty and students are involved in joint research cutting across a wide spectrum of issues at the core of marketing, as well as multidisciplinary topics that interface with other functional areas such as management, economics, and psychology. Some current faculty and PhD student research interests are listed below.

• Impact of interactivity on information quality
• Information quality and consumer adoption of new media
• Multinational firm strategy and behavior
• Online information search and decision making
• Social media
• Seller influence tactics
• Inferential processes and reasoning
• Managing market changes in an e-commerce environment
• Acceptance of new products and technologies
• Marketing by entrepreneurial firms
• Proactive post-sales services

For more information, please view the marketing website at:
http://mgt.gatech.edu/fac_research/acad_areas/marketing.html