Venky Shankar

Renowned Professor of Marketing Venkatesh “Venky” Shankar joined SMU Cox as the new Harold M. Brierley Endowed Professor with the Brierley Institute for Customer Engagement and also as a Professor of Marketing at the Cox School in January 2024. The Brierley Institute for Customer Engagement is the world’s first academic institute created to advance knowledge of and improve business practices in customer engagement. As part of the Brierley Institute’s leadership team, Shankar works closely with Institute Director Brad Harraman and Institute benefactor Hal Brierley, who serves as executive in residence of the Brierley Institute and continues to impart his many years of customer engagement expertise and thought leadership. The Brierley Institute enables MBA candidates studying marketing to specialize in customer engagement and then pursue successful careers that will shape the future of customer loyalty strategies.

For having made significant contributions to the research, theory and practice of marketing, the American Marketing Association (AMA) nominated Shankar to be an AMA Fellow. He was selected for the fellowship by a group of distinguished academic peers and was honored at the AMA Winter Academic Conference February 23-25 in St. Pete Beach, Florida.

Prior to joining the Cox School, Shankar served as the Ford Chair Professor of Marketing & E-Commerce and Director of Research at the Center for Retailing Studies at the Mays Business School, Texas A&M University. In 2020, 2021 and 2022, Mendeley Data ranked Shankar among the Top 1% of scientists in marketing based on citation data covering seven million scientists in 22 major fields. In 2014, also based on data calculations of highly cited papers, Thomson Reuters recognized Shankar as one of the World’s Most Influential Scientific Minds. He has received numerous other academic honors, including being named one of the Top 10 experts on innovation management worldwide by the Journal of Product Innovation Management in 2012.

Besides an extensive body of award-winning research in customer engagement and marketing, Shankar brings to the Brierley Institute his expertise and research in digital business, marketing strategy, retailing, international marketing and pricing. Shankar’s coedited “The Handbook of Marketing Strategy" has been touted as “an essential resource guide for researchers, doctoral students, practitioners, and consultants in the field of marketing strategy.”

As a community of graduate students, academics and corporate leaders, the Brierley Institute examines and explores why customers engage with brands, and how that engagement drives loyalty and value. The Institute introduces proven strategies for establishing and sustaining profitable customer relationships, engineering behavior change, and understanding the role consumer psychology plays. Additionally, it addresses a critical and growing business need: capturing customer attention in what Hal Brierley has described as “a time-starved, social media-obsessed environment.”