Marketing professor Aric Rindfleisch doesn’t talk about impact the way most academics do. When John Byrne asks him to name the most significant contribution of his career, Rindfleisch doesn’t point first to journals, citations, or conference keynotes. He points to the classroom and, more specifically, to the hundreds of thousands of learners who have encountered his teaching far beyond the University of Illinois.

Rindfleisch has spent 13 years at the Gies College of Business, arriving after his doctoral training and early career at the University of Wisconsin. His route into academia wasn’t linear, and that matters to how he approaches both marketing and education. A firstgeneration college student raised by his grandparents on a modest Social Security income, he grew up on the edge of a wealthy Connecticut town, surrounded by classmates who seemed to have effortless access to the things he didn’t. That proximity to affluence, without participation in it, became one of the earliest seeds of his intellectual curiosity: why do people believe “more” will make them happy, and why does that promise so often fail?

He credits a handful of mentors with nudging him toward a PhD long before he believed it was feasible. One was an older friend who shared a passion for rock climbing and posed a simple question: why not pursue the highest level of study? Another was a professor who also served as his commander in the Army Reserve and steered him away from the MBA track toward doctoral work. Later, during his MBA at Cornell, a visiting professor demystified the life of a marketing academic, an influence that stayed with him even after he entered the workforce.

That detour into industry was short but clarifying. Working in marketing research around Chicago, Rindfleisch discovered he loved the analytical problem-solving but chafed at the reality of “working for a living,” as he puts it, doing what others needed on their timelines, under their constraints. Graduate school offered something different: room to ask questions worth living with. So he returned to Wisconsin for his PhD, choosing marketing over international business because it combined data, psychology, and strategy, in an arena where curiosity can be formalized and tested.

Ironically, some of the questions that have defined his career push against the most cynical caricatures of the field. Marketing is often reduced to persuasion, to “getting people to buy stuff.” Rindfleisch doesn’t deny that the discipline is intertwined with markets and consumption, but his research has explored the emotional and psychological costs of consumption itself. Early in his career, he and a colleague published a series of papers on materialism, how strongly people value acquiring possessions and status goods, and why materialistic aspirations tend to track with lower well-being. Their “Conflicting Values Theory” argues that unhappiness is intensified when people try to hold two clashing sets of values at once: the self-enhancing pull of material success alongside the self-transcendent ideals society also promotes family, community, faith, and shared purpose. The friction between “buy more” and “be better” can become its own kind of stress.

Yet if research gave Rindfleisch a framework for understanding the world, teaching became the vehicle for changing it. He’s particularly proud of his role in the iMBA program, where he helped create early digital marketing courses that scaled far beyond a single campus. Combined, those offerings have reached roughly 750,000 learners, an audience he notes is surpassed only by Google’s own education efforts. For Rindfleisch, the statistic isn’t about bragging rights; it’s evidence that business education can be both rigorous and radically accessible.

That belief shows up in how he designs learning experiences. In one course, Advanced Marketing Management, he runs students through Markstrat, a simulation born at INSEAD that forces teams to make interconnected decisions under uncertainty—product development, positioning, resource allocation, while reacting to rivals’ moves in a shifting market. In another, he takes structure away almost entirely. His “Making Things” course is built around the Illinois MakerLab, which he founded as the first 3D-printing lab housed in a business school. There’s no client and no assigned product. Teams have to identify a need, design a solution, prototype it, manufacture it, and market it, moving from idea to object to offer. Over the years, students have produced everything from custom planters with scanned faces to bottle holders designed for people on crutches, to playful cookie cutters and campus-inspired keepsakes.

The throughline is realism—not case-study realism, but the realism of messy decisions and imperfect execution. That same lens shapes the ideas he’s drawn to recently, including David Bell’s book Location Is Still Everything, which argues that even digitalnative brands spread in stubbornly physical ways. Adoption can be influenced by who lives near you, what you see on your street, and what shows up in your neighbor’s recycling bin, reminders that “digital” doesn’t erase place, it layers on top of it.

When Byrne zooms out to ask what business education should become in the age of AI, Rindfleisch offers a single word: humanity. In a world where machines can out-optimize and out-analyze, he argues, the differentiator won’t be raw efficiency. It will be the qualities that remain difficult to automate—empathy, judgment, creativity, and even the productive value of human mistakes. If AI is accelerating everything else, business schools, in his view, should double down on what makes people worth hiring, trusting, and following in the first place.

Listen to the full conversation here: https://www.buzzsprout.com/221123/episodes/18612259

© Copyright 2026 Poets & Quants. All rights reserved. This article may not be republished, rewritten or otherwise distributed without written permission. To reprint or license this article or any content from Poets & Quants, please submit your request HERE.