2026 Best 40-Under-40 Business Professors: Jake Teeny, Northwestern Kellogg School of Management

 

Jake Teeny
Northwestern University
Kellogg School of Management 

“Coming out of this class, I am strongly considering a career change from supply chain management to marketing, and Professor Teeny played a significant role in that decision. As an engineer by trade, I’ve always considered myself ‘a numbers guy,’ and I wasn’t particularly interested in a field that I incorrectly perceived as deceptive and filled with fluff. To end the quarter, Professor Teeny summarized the essence of marketing in a single sentence that stuck with me: ‘How do you tell a story and connect it to the consumer?’ As someone who writes music as my creative outlet, storytelling and creating emotional connections with people has always been important to me. This course opened my eyes to the fact that marketing has the power to do exactly the same thing. Professor Teeny made every class engaging and thought-provoking, even during late evening sessions after long workdays for many students. He brought in speakers who spoke to storytelling in their own careers at a wide range of companies, and he consistently challenged us to think critically while inspiring creativity, embodying what an exceptional professor should be: engaging, insightful, and genuinely invested in the impact he has on his students.” – Joey Abi-Sarkis

Jake Teeny, 36, is an Associate Professor of Marketing at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University. He is a founding member of Kellogg’s Advertising Technology Lab (which has a research partnership with Meta) and a founding faculty affiliate of Northwestern’s Center for Enlightened Disagreement. 

His research centers on the science of persuasion: how people and messages change others’ opinions and beliefs. Recently, he has focused on personalized persuasion, explaining why the same message can change one person’s mind and leave another completely unmoved – and how AI can change the scale, precision, and stakes of all of this. His work sits at the intersection of consumer psychology, advertising strategy, and AI-enabled messaging. 

Teeny’s research has been published in outlets including Nature, Nature Human Behaviour, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Psychological Science, Journal of Marketing, Journal of Consumer Psychology, and more. He is a co-author of The Handbook of Personalized Persuasion: Theory and Application and has written several book chapters translating persuasion science for consumer psychology and marketing audiences. 

He is the recipient of the 2026 Rising Star Award from the Association for Psychological Science and the 2024 Sid J. Levy Teaching Award from the Kellogg School of Management. His work has been covered by TIME, Forbes, Business Insider, the World Economic Forum, Science News, and more, and he has appeared on TEDx as well as podcasts including The Brainy Business, Serious Inquiries Only, and Opinion Science. 

Teeny also runs EverydayPsych.com, a long-running website that translates social-psychological and marketing research to enhance the lives of everyday people. 

BACKGROUND 

At current institution since what year?  2020 

Education:  

• PhD Social Psychology, The Ohio State University 
• MA Social Psychology, The Ohio State University 
• BS Psychology and Philosophy, Santa Clara University 

List of MBA/graduate business courses you currently teach:  Advertising Strategy (MBA)

TELL US ABOUT LIFE AS A BUSINESS SCHOOL PROFESSOR 

I knew I wanted to be a business school professor when …  This answer begins in the sixth grade – when my middle school science fair project was banned from the competition. Research on ‘why are my neighbors weird?’ is apparently not an acceptable science fair question, but a good start to a career. My science fair teacher explained that what I was really interested in was this thing called psy-chol-o-gy…

From that point, I had a one-track mind in wanting to become an expert in it, specifically, the psychology of persuasion. In my first semester as a PhD student, however, I learned about this thing called mar-ke-ting – and that it was its own field of study. I was enamored immediately. It gave me a home for the part of psychology that wanted to leave the lab and bump into real life. So, I took all the classes in the marketing department, started researching with marketing faculty, went to all their conferences, and eventually joined Kellogg. Ultimately, the 11-year-old who first wanted to understand his neighbors’ oddities can keep asking the same questions – just now with better tools (and an IRB). 

What are you currently researching and what is the most significant discovery you’ve made from it? Currently, I’ve been focused on researching how to optimize personalized persuasion: tailoring a message to people’s psychology to enhance its influence. My work explains when personalization is effective, what exactly should be personalized, and how new technologies like generative AI can change the scale and stakes of that process. Some of my recent work has focused on showing that personalization is not some magic dust you sprinkle on a message. It has to be done carefully and within a specified framework to really harness its influence. In particular, most people think personalization is a transmission problem – say the right thing to the right person and they’ll move. My work shows that it’s actually a reception problem. Persuasion happens not because of what the message says, but because of what the audience says back to themselves.  

If I weren’t a business school professor…  I would be a fiction writer. Or maybe a river raft guide. Or probably both.  

What do you think makes you stand out as a professor? Although I take my work very seriously, I don’t take myself very seriously. I’m dedicated to getting the science right, and I’m very passionate about communicating it in a way that is both informative and entertaining (assuming you find dad jokes entertaining). This means I have no problem being silly or admitting when I don’t know something or saying something random but interesting. I find that if students are willing to laugh with me, they’re usually more willing to think with me, too. 

Here’s what I wish someone would’ve told me about being a business school professor:  It’s very easy to confuse being busy with doing meaningful work. I think this is something that’s true for society at large (there are so many ways to feel like you’re “being productive”). The job then becomes less about having brilliant ideas and more about cultivating the conditions that make brilliant ideas possible. This includes getting students to challenge you, having meetings with collaborators who bring a different perspective, and definitely having a coffee machine in your office so you don’t get trapped in chitchat when you need a refill. In the business school, it’s not about finding things to do but protecting the time and your energy for the few things worth doing. 

Professor I most admire and why:  It will sound cliché, but my PhD adviser, Rich Petty, is the professor I admire most, hands down. First, he is the smartest academic I have ever met. Second – and equally important – he is the most down-to-earth one I have ever met. He discovered the most influential theory of persuasion, has published hundreds of articles in the most respected journals, and is one of the most cited behavioral scientists alive. And he is incredibly modest. Like I would definitely be bragging if I were him. In my mind, he is the ideal scholar: he conducts highly impactful, meaningful science, he is an outstanding teacher and adviser, and he’s really witty and easy to talk with.  

What do you enjoy most about teaching business students? I can only speak to my experience with students at Kellogg, but what I enjoy most about them is just how smart and engaged they are. They will push me on frameworks, they will bring their innovative start-up ideas to office hours, they will send advertisements to me that I haven’t seen but demonstrate a principle. MBA students are professional pattern-recognizers, and I really enjoy watching the discoveries they make—how they think, apply frameworks, and find what’s personally relevant.  

What is most challenging? The hardest part is balancing rigor with immediacy. Advertising is constantly changing. And fast. What was a really clever finding two years ago is now the assumed default. So keeping pace with the actual trends in advertising can be difficult – and then translating that into a useful version for MBA students adds its own complexity. Too much theory and the smartphones come out. Too little theory and you get skeptical looks. My goal, then, is always to ground any framework or advice in a practical context that they could start using on Monday, while still being able to explain the science behind why it works. 

When it comes to grading, I think students would describe me as…  For grading, students would probably describe me as less concerned about the grade and more about the learning. I understand that we need grades – both systematically and as a form of extrinsic motivation – but my concern is that students will treat the grade as the goal, when really it’s just a proxy. So, for paper assignments, I employ a “High Pass,” “Pass,” “Low Pass” framework that encourages students to focus on understanding the content in a way that matters for them. 

LIFE OUTSIDE OF THE CLASSROOM 

What are your hobbies? I should begin by saying that with a 3-year-old and 8-month-old, my true hobby these days is dreaming about having hobbies. But when I do have time, I love to play basketball (extra credit to students who can beat me one-on-one), write stories and screenplays (extra credit to students who tell me they love my stories), and lately, build with AI (an email organizer, a child activity planner, a custom image generator). 

How will you spend your summer? If you’ve ever lived in Chicago, you know that summers here are better than anywhere else – which is why it’s bittersweet that I’ll be doing so much traveling this summer. Back to Portland, OR to see my family, to Denver, CO to see my wife’s family, and then to Columbus, OH and Vail, CO for AI and marketing conferences, respectively. When at home, though, you can bet I’ll be running with my dog along Lake Michigan. 

Favorite place(s) to vacation:  So, my body temperature runs about a degree colder than average (the lamest “superpower” anyone could ask for), so I really like the heat. In fact, on hot summer days, I like to sit in the car and do a quick sauna bake while my wife raps on the window to hurry it up. So, my favorite places to travel are anywhere warm where I can get out and explore nature. (The Atacama Desert in Chile was amazing for both of these things.) 

Favorite book(s):  I am a huge fan of fantasy/sci-fi. So, I loved the Stormlight Archive series by Brandon Sanderson, the Red Rising series by Pierce Brown, and recently, the Dungeon Crawler Carl series by Matt Dinniman. And these are just a few… I pretty much just listen to audiobooks these days, so I’m “reading” all the time. 

What is currently your favorite movie and/or show and what is it about the film or program that you enjoy so much?  My favorite movie of all time is The Matrix. The world-building is so cool. The philosophy behind it gets you thinking. And the fight scenes are badass. (Not sure if that will get edited but there’s no other way to describe them.) As for shows, I’m just going to have to fire off a bunch: Fallout, Avatar: The Last Airbender, (most of) Game of Thrones, The Boys, What We Do in the Shadows, and now, Bluey.  

What is your favorite type of music or artist(s) and why? My wife and close friends love to roast me about this, but I honestly don’t listen to a ton of music (assuming you don’t count Disney sing-alongs and Baby Shark). Audiobooks (or audio debates with ChatGPT) are pretty much how I spend all of my time listening. Or background “rain sounds” if I’m working and it’s noisy. I know. I’m weird. 

THOUGHTS AND REFLECTIONS 

If I had my way, the business school of the future would have much more of this…  I feel lucky to be at Kellogg because it is already doing many of the things I would want from the business school of the future. For example, business schools should not just teach students how to use AI; they should teach them what remains distinctly human when AI gets good at almost everything else. As technical work becomes easier to automate, judgment, persuasion, disagreement, creativity, and taste become more valuable — not less. Kellogg strives to instill those skills. It combines analytical rigor with the human skills that leaders actually need: how to understand people, persuade responsibly, make decisions under uncertainty, and work across disagreement. The future business school should produce graduates who are not just technically fluent, but wise about when, why, and for whom those tools should be applied. 

In my opinion, companies and organizations today need to do a better job at…  specifying the problems that matter for them – or in other words, personalizing their own solutions. I often see brands wanting to adopt new technologies (cough, AI) or new organizational structures without understanding what problems they’re trying to solve for. I think that in pursuit of growth, companies (reasonably) want to implement the latest and greatest without stopping to really question (1) what are the frictions they’re solving for and (2) what is the path forward that most aligns with their strengths. All of this circles around the idea that much of the decision-making often comes from the top down, but – as we see with personalization research – taking the time to really craft solutions based on boots-on-the-ground (personalized) feedback can be more valuable than trying to impose a theory for optimal conditions. Most companies want to buy the solution before they’ve named the problem. AI is the current example, but the pattern is older than AI. 

I’m grateful for… Is “everything” an acceptable answer? I feel grateful to work at such an amazing university with such intelligent and motivated students. I feel grateful that I have such a wonderful family – both my wife and children (and dog) as well as immediate and extended family. I feel grateful to have won this award and am able to conduct research that excites me. Heck, I feel grateful that I’m able to express what I feel grateful for. Okay, too meta. I’ll stop there. (But there’s a lot more I feel grateful for.) 

DON’T MISS: THE ENTIRE 2026 ROSTER OF THE WORLD’S BEST 40-UNDER-40 GRADUATE BUSINESS PROFESSORS 

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