World’s Best B-School Professors: Jennifer Aaker

Jennifer Aaker

Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business

Claim to Fame: Her father, David, is a famous marketing scholar and teacher at the UC-Berkeley’s Haas School 

Education:

UC-Berkeley, BA, Psychology, 1989

Stanford Graduate School of Business, PhD, Marketing 1995

At Stanford Since: 2005

Fun Fact: She counts winning a dance-off in the early 1980’s among her most impressive accomplishments

If I wasn’t teaching, my dream job would be: An oncologist

Best part of the job: The ability to generate, empirically test, and share new ideas

Worst part of the job: Grading. It can truly be painful.

A social psychologist and marketer, Jennifer Aaker is the General Atlantic Professor of Marketing and Ormond Family Faculty at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business. Her research spans time, money and happiness. She focuses on questions such as: What actually makes people happy, as opposed to what they think makes them happy? How can small acts create infectious action, and how can such effects be fueled by social media? She is widely published in the leading scholarly journals in psychology and marketing, and her work has been featured in a variety of media including The Economist, The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, BusinessWeek, Forbes, CBS Money Watch, NPR, Science, Inc, and Cosmopolitan.

Jennifer teaches in many of Stanford’s Executive Education programs as well as MBA electives including The Power of Social Technology, Designing Happiness, How to Tell a Story, as well as Designing Brands, Experience & Social Technology (d.BEST). A recipient of the Distinguished Teaching Award, Citibank Best Teacher Award, George Robbins Best Teacher Award and both the Spence and Fletcher Jones Faculty Scholar Awards, she has also taught at UC Berkeley, UCLA and Columbia. Most recently she has co-authored, The Dragonfly Effect: Quick Effective Powerful Ways to Harness Social Media for Impact. Finally, she advises a student-run group called 100K Cheeks, which lives at the Haas Center and the GSB, and is focused on harnessing social media for impact.

A homegrown Californian, Jennifer has studied at the Sorbonne, and counts winning a dance-off in the early 1980’s among her most impressive accomplishments. She cooks very poorly.

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