Faculty & Curriculum : Faculty Profile

Research Interests Marketing strategy and execution New products Innovation and technology

Dr. Steven Permut

Before coming to Eller's Department of Marketing, Steven Permut taught for nearly a dozen years in the marketing department at Yale University’s School of Management, and later served as Executive Director of Executive Education.

As an academic who always links theory with the real world of practice, his consulting clients have included the marketing and sales organizations of nearly 50 major firms ranging from AT&T, BT, Coca-Cola, GE, GM, IBM, Xerox, and a host of others. Over the years, he has conducted more than 100 client-based marketing studies to help introduce new technologies to the marketplace. It is the experience gained from working with leading-edge firms that guide the concepts and practices he brings to the Eller classroom to share with students.

Steven Permut on his market-based management course:

Market-Based Management focuses on the critical requirements for any successful business, namely how to attract, retain, and grow customers in a profitable and timely manner.

The course uses numerous business case studies from Harvard that student teams analyze and discuss in class. For example, Starbuck’s was trying to decide how to keep its core group of customers happy — those who like to order custom drinks and spend an hour or more reading or surfing the web — while a new group of in-a-hurry customers just wanted a fast cup of coffee on the go. Our student teams had to decide if Starbuck’s should spend $40 million in various ways, including drive-though windows, to keep both groups of customers happy, or if alternative strategies were more appropriate. These are contemporary problems that require rigorous quantitative and qualitative analysis.

Even if you are not planning to be a marketing person, every manager needs to understand the dynamics of customers and competitors, and how to craft strategies and tactics to make sure they target and retain profitable customers to make the firm grow and prosper. As Peter Drucker, the famous guru of management once said, “The purpose of business is to create a customer” — and that’s our focus in this course.
  

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