About the Center

James Farley/Booz Allen Hamilton Professor of Marketing Strategy Gregory S. Carpenter Photo © Nathan Mandell

The Center for Market Leadership, founded in 2008, is establishing itself as a resource for scholars and senior executives worldwide. The center achieves its mission through three primary strategies: interdisciplinary research, executive education, and conferences with corporate partners. Our research has lately focused on how leading organizations transform themselves to be more customer-oriented and, with that orientation, drive innovation and growth. Much of this work has become the core of executive programs designed for senior executives responsible for creating a culture in which innovation and growth are central. One of the center’s initial conferences was The CMO Summit, a meeting of chief marketing officers at the Kellogg School, sponsored jointly with the Marketing Science Institute and McKinsey & Company. The conference brought together leading practitioners to discuss the challenges and opportunities facing chief marketing officers at companies such as McDonalds, Target and many others.

Over the next few years, the center is planning to continue and expand research efforts, publish our findings for scholars and managers, and offer seminars and conferences to senior executives.

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Our Mission

The mission of the Center for Market Leadership is to advance our
understanding of how organizations create and sustain leading market positions and how some organizations even define the markets in which they compete. Our belief is that the deeper understanding of market leadership can
be achieved through interdisciplinary study of the intersection of customer behavior, organizational behavior and competition. Traditionally, these topics are explored separately usin g different paradigms, but we believe an integrated, interdisciplinary approach can yield important new insights into the nature of enduring competitive advantage. Through our efforts, we hope to identify a new understanding of the critical role of marketing in organizational effectiveness, growth, and sustained success.