PhD in Marketing

Program Overview

The PhD in Business Administration with a focus in Marketing provides students with both strong empirical skills in econometrics, psychometrics, and statistics and strong theory development in consumer behavior, psychology, and strategy.

The department and its faculty consistently rank high in terms of research productivity. The department is ranked 15th worldwide based on publications in the premier American Marketing Association (AMA) journals in 2010 – 2019. The department is also ranked 11th among all U.S. public schools in the UT-Dallas Business School Research Rankings 2019-2022. Faculty have won multiple research awards and serve on the editorial boards of prestigious academic journals.

Doctoral students work with faculty at all phases of the research process—from research question formulation, research design, and data analysis to writing up the study. The culture is collegial and informal, with students viewed as colleagues and coauthors. Moreover, students are encouraged to work with multiple faculty, not just their chosen advisor or dissertation chair.

Student Profile

What kind of students are we looking for?

Consequently, the department looks for the following traits in PhD students:

• Motivated, excited and intellectually curious about problems and issues
• Disciplined and committed to think deeply about research problems and solutions
• A willingness to learn econometric, psychometric and statistical skills
• A willingness to learn about theoretical and conceptual issues in the field
• Creative problem solvers
• Business experience useful, but not a requirement.

Consumer behavior students typically work with:

• Marcus Cunha
• Tari Dagogo-Jack
• John Hulland
• Charlotte Mason
• Julio Sevilla
• Rosanna Smith
• Sarah Whitley

Marketing strategy students typically work with:

• Neil Bendle
• Sundar Bharadwaj
• Anindita Chakravarty
• Hua Chen
• Tatiana  Dyachenko
• John Hulland
• Son K. Lam
• Pengyuan Wang
• Elham Yazdani

Typical Course Sequence

All the marketing departmental courses are required courses. Electives chosen will need the approval of the Graduate Coordinator. 

Concentrations

Consumer behavior research focuses on how consumers decide what and how much to consume and how consumers integrate different pieces of information (both consciously and unconsciously) to make predictions and judgments about their environment and target stimuli to inform their consumption decisions. Consumer behavior students take additional courses in psychology and sociology.

Marketing strategy research focuses on the components of marketing capabilities and resources such as brands, consumer relationships, innovation, sales force management and their impact on brand, business unit, customer, firm and sales force and salesperson performance. Marketing strategy students typically take additional courses in economics, econometrics and statistical methods as well courses in corporate finance, management strategy, sociology and social psychology.

PhD Student Academic Placements

Our PhD students have been successfully placed at research active universities. Some illustrative placements are as follows.