Barbara E. Kahn returned to The Wharton School in January 2011 to serve as the Patty and Jay H. Baker Professor of Marketing and the Director of the Jay H. Baker Retailing Center.
Prior to rejoining Wharton, Barbara served for three and a half years as the Dean and Schein Family Chair Professor of Marketing at the School of Business Administration, University of Miami, Coral Gables, Florida. While Dean at the University of Miami, she launched new global initiatives and academic programs, attracted top faculty from some of the world’s leading business schools to enhance the caliber of the school’s research and teaching, and established new partnerships with the business community. All of these initiatives helped the School rise significantly in the ratings. She also established the Global Business Forum at the University of Miami which brought over 1000 leading business executives and professionals to the campus.
Before becoming Dean at University of Miami, Barbara spent 17 years at The Wharton School as the Dorothy Silberberg Professor of Marketing. She was also Vice Dean and Director of the Wharton Undergraduate program. She was a Senior Fellow of the Leonard Davis Institute and a faculty member of the Graduate Group in the Psychology Department. Before joining the Wharton faculty in 1990, Barbara served on the faculty at the Anderson School of Management at UCLA. She was the Hakuhodo Advertising Agency Visiting Scholar at University of Tokyo in 1993 and a Visiting Academic at the University of Sydney, Australia, in 1996.
Barbara is an internationally recognized scholar on variety seeking, brand loyalty, retail assortment issues and patient decision-making whose research provides marketing managers with a better understanding of the consumer choice process. She has published more than 60 articles in leading academic journals. Between 1982 and 2006, she was the world’s seventh most published author of articles in the most prestigious marketing journals. She co-authored Grocery Revolution: The New Focus on the Consumer, a book that chronicled the dramatically changing supermarket industry and outlined how consumers make choices within the supermarket. In 2013, she published Global Brand Power: Leveraging Branding for Long-Term Growth.
Barbara has been elected president of the Association of Consumer Research, elected president of the Journal of Consumer Research Policy Board and selected as a Marketing Science Institute Trustee. She has been or is area editor at Marketing Science, and associate editor both at the Journal of Consumer Research and Journal of Marketing. She is or has been on the editorial boards of the Journal of Marketing Research, Marketing Science, the Journal of Marketing, the Journal of Consumer Research, the Journal of Behavioral Decision Making and Marketing Letters.
She received her PhD, MBA and MPhil degrees from Columbia University, and a BA in English Literature from the University of Rochester.
