Michael Braun

Michael Braun, Associate Professor of Marketing at the Cox School of Business, joined the SMU community in 2013 after seven years on the faculty of the MIT Sloan School of Management.  The core of his research is the statistical analysis of large and complex customer databases, with an emphasis on customer lifetime value, advertising effectives, and public policy issues. He has written on, spoken on, and taught about management topics such as sales forecasting, customer retention and valuation, marketing ROI, social networking models, segmentation and targeting strategies, online advertising and insurance decisions.  Professor Braun’s work has been published in top academic publications such as Marketing Science, Management Science, and the Journal of the American Statistical Association, and he is a member of the Marketing Science Editorial Review Board. He has held several leadership positions for the American Statistical Association's Section on Statistics and Marketing, including Section Chair in 2011 and Program Chair in 2009, 2013 and 2015.  In addition, he is the author of four software packages for the R statistical computing language. Professor Braun’s teaching interests are to train the next generation of business leaders on how to analyze, interpret and use marketing data to address real-world managerial problems. He takes a hands-on approach with his classes, believing that managers cannot effectively act on the volumes of customer data that they collect, unless they master a foundational set of quantitative, statistical tools. He teaches the Managerial Statistics in the Cox School’s M.B.A. and other graduate management programs, as well as Customer Analytics Using Probability Models in the M.S. in Business Analytics program. Michael Braun earned his Ph.D. from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.  He holds an A.B. with Honors in Economics from Princeton University, and an M.B.A. from the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University.  Before entering academia, he worked on the development and deployment of broadband Internet products for such companies as Comcast, Marcus Cable and Charter Communications. From 1999 to 2002, he was Vice President for Global Affiliate Operations of Chello Broadband, the Amsterdam-based Internet arm of United Pan-Europe Communications. He also worked as a production assistant at ESPN, and as a researcher for NBC at the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona.