The PhD Program in Marketing at USC is intended to prepare students to become:
- Scholars who excel at initiating and conducting original theoretical and empirical research to be published in the leading academic marketing journals.
- Professors who are capable of instructing, mentoring and inspiring students in leading business schools at the undergraduate, masters and doctoral levels.
- Colleagues who make strong positive contributions to their departments, universities and communities.
Program Overview
The culture of the PhD program in the Department of Marketing is research focused, collegial, supportive, and highly interactive. PhD students are viewed as “junior colleagues” and are encouraged to become involved in academic research with faculty early in their careers.
Students are assigned a faculty advisor for their first two years and learn research fundamentals through research assistantships with various faculty members. As they progress through their doctoral program, students work with a faculty guidance committee and then a dissertation committee as they prepare for their qualifying exams and dissertations. The relatively low PhD student-to-faculty ratio coupled with the faculty’s “open door” policy allows for frequent and meaningful interactions between faculty and students regarding research, careers and teaching.
Over the years, our doctoral students have made significant contributions to the field by publishing in leading journals and winning numerous prestigious research awards. For instance, our doctoral students have won prominent national dissertation competitions such as the SCP Sheth Award (2003) and have published in major research journals such as the Journal of Consumer Research, the Journal of Marketing, The Journal of Marketing Research and Marketing Science among others. All our students are research active and over the last ten years our doctoral students have co-authored 40 articles with our faculty, 25 of which have been in the top tier marketing journals. Most of our senior doctoral students have either published papers or have manuscripts under advanced stages of review at major marketing journals.
Our recent placements include strong research schools such as Dartmouth, Emory, Georgia, NYU, Ohio State, Queens, Texas A&M, the University of Minnesota and University of Wisconsin, Madison. Further, in the process of applying for tenure track positions, our studens have had campus visits with other leading research programs like Cornell, Pennsyalvania State University, London Business School, Stanford, and Wharton among others.
Our faculty share interests in diverse marketing topics including advertising, consumer behavior, distribution channels, branding, innovations, marketing models, business to business marketing, high-technology marketing, pricing, promotion, new product development and so on. Faculty members are trained in such disciplines as economics, marketing, operations research, psychology, sociology, and statistics. This eclectic mix stimulates joint research across disciplines. It also provides students with a broad exposure to academic research in marketing and a rich training in research methods and philosophies.
Our research environment is further enhanced by scholarly presentations from invited faculty from around the world, internal brown bag seminars, and colloquia with other research-oriented universities in the Southern California area.