John A. Deighton

Professor John Deighton is the Harold M. Brierley Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. He is an authority on consumer behavior and marketing, with a focus on online and direct marketing. He is the immediate past editor of the Journal of Consumer Research, a leading outlet for scholarly research on consumer behavior, and was the founding co-editor of the Journal of Interactive Marketing, which reports academic research on marketing and the Internet. He initiated and leads the HBS Executive Education program titled Taking Marketing Digital. He has served as course head of the first year MBA course in Marketing, and has taught elective MBA courses in Business Marketing, Consumer Marketing, Interactive Marketing and Digital Marketing Strategy.

His current research (which can be followed on Twitter at HBSmktg) deals with online marketing and is conducted largely by close study of specific situations. He has studied the use of social media in the Obama/Clinton primary campaign, the Dove "Real Beauty" campaign, the business models of Demand Media and Cheezburger.com, the use of blogging in the Ford Fiesta launch, how the Coca Cola Facebook presence is managed, management styles and practices in the shift in the music industry from physical to digital product, database marketing in Hilton Hotels' frequent guest program, and a series of cases on the processes by which viral videos such as 'United Breaks Guitars' and the 'JK Wedding Dance' were propagated online and offline.

His recent academic publications have been on online marketing, including "Adding Bricks to Clicks: Predicting the Patterns of Cross-Channel Elasticities Over Time", in the Journal of Marketing, and"Interactivity's Unanticipated Consequences for Marketers and Marketing" in the Journal of Interactive Marketing. His research on marketing management and consumer behavior is published in the Journal of Consumer Research, the Journal of Marketing Research, the Journal of Marketing, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, the Harvard Business Review, and other journals. His research has received a number of commendations, including the "best article" award of the American Marketing Association for an article in the Journal of Marketing, and an honorable mention in the Journal of interactive Marketing. He received the University of Chicago's Hillel J. Einhorn award for excellence in teaching, and was named "outstanding educator" by the Direct Marketing Education Foundation. He has been a visiting scholar at the University of Tokyo, Duke University's Fuqua School of Business, and the Judge School of Business at Cambridge University.

He is the Executive Director of the Marketing Science Institute, a board member of the Direct Marketing Education Foundation, and a Director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. He received the Greenhill Award for outstanding service to HBS, where has been on the faculty since 1994.

Prior to joining the Harvard Business School he was on the faculties of the University of Chicago and the Amos Tuck School, Dartmouth College. His Ph.D. is in marketing from the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. He has an undergraduate chemical engineering degree from the University of Natal and an MBA from the University of Cape Town. His applied research includes consulting with a number of U.S and international corporations.