Faculty & Research
Jill J. Avery

Jill J. Avery

Senior Lecturer of Business Administration
C. Roland Christensen Distinguished Management Educator

Senior Lecturer of Business Administration
C. Roland Christensen Distinguished Management Educator

Marketing
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Jill J. Avery
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Featured Work Publications Research Summary Teaching Awards & Honors

Dr. Jill Avery is a Senior Lecturer of Business Administration and C. Roland Christensen Distinguished Management Educator in the marketing unit at Harvard Business School. She is a recognized and respected authority on brand management, customer relationship management (CRM), and digital marketing. She brings a distinctive blend of skills and experiences to serve as an important bridge between the worlds of practice and academia. Prior to her doctoral studies, she was a distinguished consumer packaged goods (CPG) brand management executive who managed the Gillette, Braun, Sam Adams, and AT&T brands. She began her career on the agency side of the business, as an account executive creating and managing consumer promotions for blue chip CPG clients. Thus, it is in the real world where she first developed a passion for brands, lived the experiences that enliven and enrich her contributions in the classroom, and encountered the managerial questions that inspire and ground her research. Today, she remains close to practice by serving as a board member, consultant, educator, and advisor to companies and their executives. She is a Corporate Director and Chair of the Audit Committee of the Amica Mutual Insurance Company, an Independent Director and member of the Audit Committee at Kopin Corporation (NASDAQ: KOPN), President Emerita and a Trustee at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and a former Trustee of St. Paul's School. 

She is a passionate and enthusiastic award-winning teacher and a creative and innovative course designer who is currently teaching two MBA courses, Marketing and Creating Brand Value at HBS. She is a popular instructor in Harvard Business School’s Executive Education programs and has led global executives in sessions on marketing and strategy in programs including Driving Digital Strategy, Taking Marketing Digital, Marketing in the Digital Era, Strategic Marketing Management, Global Strategic Management, Launching New Ventures, and Transforming Customer Experiences. She has also partnered with and developed custom executive education curricula for AB InBev, The Coca-Cola Company, Constellation Brands, Kellogg's, IBM, ANTA, Bacardi, HubSpot, Midea, Endeavor, YPO Gold, American Express, and National Arts Strategies. 

She is a prolific and award-winning author of over 100 journal articles, book chapters, teaching cases, and technical notes on branding, CRM, and digital marketing, which are known for both their academic rigor and real-world relevance. Her research spans the worlds of academia and practice and has been published in the top academic marketing journals, including Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Marketing, International Journal of Research in Marketing, and Journal for the Advancement of Marketing Education. She reaches a broader audience through managerial articles and case studies that bring her academic work into practice in Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, European Business Review, and Business Horizons. She is the coauthor of the edited book Strong Brands, Strong Relationships, published by Routledge. Her field research and teaching cases have sold over 1 million copies and are taught at the top global business schools, placing her as #13 (out of 8,000) on the list of bestselling case authors worldwide, and include cases on Kraft-Heinz, Nestlé, L'Oréal, Porsche, Pepsi, Budweiser, Marriott/Starwood, Longchamp, Nike, Glossier, Away, J.C. Penney, EMC, JP Morgan Chase, Shiseido, Tate Modern, Christie's, Shinola, Supreme, and the Denver Museum of Nature & Science.

Her doctoral dissertation on online brand communities and digital marketing won the Harvard Business School Wyss Award for excellence in doctoral research and the Marketing Science Institute’s Best Paper Award for work published in the International Journal of Research in Marketing. Her work on omnichannel marketing and e-commerce was recognized with the Louis W. Stern Award from the American Marketing Association, in recognition for an outstanding article that has made a significant contribution to the literature on marketing and channels distribution. Her work on underdog brands and brand storytelling earned an honorable mention for best articles published in the Journal of Consumer Research in 2011. The Case Centre awarded her HubSpot case on digital marketing the Marketing Award in 2014, her Accor Hotels case on digital disruption and transformation the Overall Case Award in 2019, and her GAP case on big data and predictive analytics the Marketing Award in 2020. Her branding insights have been cited in Advertising Age, The Economist, The New York Times, The Financial Times, Forbes, The Atlantic, and Bloomberg/Business Week, among many other publications.

At HBS, she is an empowering and devoted mentor to MBA students and junior faculty and an active ally and advocate for diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. She is a 2018 recipient of the Robert F. Greenhill award in recognition for her service to the HBS community as faculty advisor to the Women’s Student Association, as faculty chair of convening and special events, as a Section Chair, and for her partnership with the HBS admissions office to develop and deliver programming to broaden and diversify the pipeline of MBA applicants. 

She holds a Doctorate in Business Administration (marketing) from Harvard Business School, a MBA (marketing and finance) from the Wharton School, and a BA (English) from the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to joining the HBS faculty, she was an assistant professor of marketing at the Simmons School of Management from 2007-2013, where she was awarded tenure and promotion to associate professor.

Featured Work
Strong Brands, Strong Relationships

From the editor team of the ground-breaking Consumer-Brand Relationships: Theory and Practice comes this new volume. Strong Brands, Strong Relationships is a collection of innovative research and management insights that build upon the foundations of the first book, but takes the study of brand relationships outside of traditional realms by applying new theoretical frameworks and considering new contexts. The result is an expanded and better-informed account of people’s relationships with brands and a demonstration of the important and timely implications of this evolving sub-discipline.

A range of different brand relationship environments are explored in the collection, including: online digital spaces, consumer collectives, global brands, luxury brands, branding in terrorist organizations, and the brand relationships of men and transient consumers. This book attends to relationship endings as well as their beginnings, providing a full life-cycle perspective. While the first volume focused on positive relationship benefits, this collection explores dysfunctional dynamics, adversarial and politically-charged relationships, and those that are harmful to well-being. Evocative constructs are leveraged, including secrets, betrayals, anthropomorphism, lying, infidelity, retaliation, and bereavement. The curated collection provides both a deeper theoretical understanding of brand relationship phenomena and ideas for practical application from experiments and execution in commercial practice.

Strong Brands, Strong Relationships will be the perfect read for marketing faculty and graduate students interested in branding dynamics, as well as managers responsible for stewarding brands.

Unlock the Mysteries of Your Customer Relationships
in Harvard Business Review
Consumers have always had relationships with brands, but sophisticated tools for analyzing customer data are finally allowing marketing organizations to personalize and manage those relationships. With this new power comes a new challenge: People now expect companies to understand what type of relationship they want and to respond appropriately - they want firms to hold up their end of the bargain. Unfortunately, many brands don't meet those expectations.
Positioning Brands Against Large Competitors to Increase Sales
in Journal of Marketing Research
The authors explore the effects of having a large dominant competitor and show conditions under which focusing on a competitive threat, rather than hiding it, can actually help a brand. Through lab and field studies, the authors demonstrate that highlighting a large competitor's size and close proximity can help smaller brands rather than harm them. The results show that support for small brands goes up when faced with a competitive threat from large brands versus when they are in competition with brands that are similar to them or when consumers view them outside a competitive context. This support translates into purchase intentions, real purchases, and more favorable online reviews in a study of more than 10,000 Yelp posts. The authors argue that this “framing-the-game effect” is mediated by consumers' motivation to express their views and have an impact in the marketplace through their purchase choices.
Defending the Markers of Masculinity: Consumer Resistance to Brand Gender-Bending
in International Journal of Research in Marketing
I study the Porsche Cayenne SUV launch to ethnographically analyze how men consuming a gendered brand respond to perceived brand gender contamination. The consumers' communal gender work in a Porsche brand community is analyzed to uncover brand gender contamination's effects on the identity projects of consumers, the brand as an identity marker, and the prevailing gender order in the group. Through the promulgation of gender stereotypes, Porsche owners stratify themselves along gender lines and create an ingroup that is sharply defined by masculinity and an outgroup that is defined by femininity. The construction of social barriers limits access to Porsche's meanings to those who achieve masculine ideals and causes the SUV owners to resort to hyper-masculine behaviors to combat exclusion. The consumers' gender work reverses the firm's efforts to gender-bend the brand, reinstates Porsche as a masculine marker, and reifies particular definitions of masculinity in the community.
The Underdog Effect: The Marketing of Disadvantage and Determination through Brand Biography
in Journal of Consumer Research

We introduce the concept of an underdog brand biography to describe an emerging trend in branding in which firms author a historical account of their humble origins, lack of resources, and determined struggle against the odds. We identify two essential dimensions of an underdog biography: external disadvantage, and passion and determination. We demonstrate that such a biography can increase purchase intentions, real choice, and brand loyalty. We argue that these biographies are effective because consumers react positively when they see the underdog aspects of their own lives being reflected in branded products. Four studies demonstrate that the underdog brand biography effect is driven by identity mechanisms: we show that the effect is (a) mediated by consumers' identification with the brand, (b) greater for consumers who strongly self-identify as underdogs, (c) stronger when consumers are purchasing for themselves versus for others, and (d) stronger in cultures in which underdog narratives are part of the national identity.

Books
Journal Articles
Working Papers
  • Avery, Jill. "Saving Face by Making Meaning: The Negative Effects of Brand Communities' Self-serving Response to Brand Extensions." (Invited for resubmission at the Journal of Consumer Research.) View Details
Book Chapters
Cases and Teaching Materials
Other Publications and Materials
Research Summary
Overview
I love brands and have been managing them and studying them for 25 years, as a brand manager and as an academic researcher and teacher. My research program focuses on brand management and customer relationship management and centers on themes relating to the meaning of brands in contemporary consumer culture. My research attempts to balance two goals often perceived to be at odds with one another — 1.) to serve businesses in their search to improve their marketing effectiveness by providing insight into how to manage their brands as meaning-based assets, and 2.) to serve consumers by providing insight into the critical role brands and their meaning play in our lives as individuals, in our relationships with others, and in the evolution of our culture.
Creating and Consuming Brand Meaning
This vibrant stream explores how managers build meaning into their brands through narrative stories, and nurture, leverage, and maintain meaning over time.  It also explores how consumers use this meaning embedded in brands to construct their identities and live their social lives.  In several papers, I explore how consumers collectively make meaning for brands in online brand communities.  In others, I explore how men construct their masculinity through the use of brands and show how gender-bending brands, taking a brand that has historically been targeted to one gender and targeting it to the other, harms men's identity work, prompting a defensive response.  In other work, I explore how consumers use underdog brands to help them negotiate their own lives.  I also explore how brands can be agents of political, social, and/or cultural change by weaving brand narratives with social missions.
Consumer-Brand Relationships and CRM
This highly pragmatic stream investigates the contemporary practice of customer relationship management (CRM) by exploring the phenomenological, lived experience of consumers' relationships with brands.  Using a contracting theory lens supplemented with knowledge of sociological practices, this work explores the consumer-brand relationship contract, outlines the contents of various relationship contracts found in consumption, and traces the process by which consumers and brands form, negotiate, and renegotiate relationships over time.  Select publications develop a critical perspective on customer relationship practices that leave the people out of the equation and create contracts that are opportunistic and misaligned. This research stream is one of the first to inquire into the dynamics of consumer-brand relationships — enlivening an important construct in marketing that had previously been theorized only as a static variable.
Branding in Digital and Social Media
This very contemporary line of research explores the rapidly changing digital world, and investigates how emerging technologies are creating a new consumer culture in which consumers expect to be partners in the co-creation of brands.  The work explores the branding effects of e-commerce, social media, virtual worlds, online brand communities, and peer-to-peer sharing and provides managerial insights into the challenges of managing big brands in the age of social media.
Teaching
Overview
Creating Brand Value (MBA elective course)

Overview:

In the consumer/retail space, brands are often companies’ most valuable assets and sources of their sustainable competitive advantage. But, managing brands to achieve their full value potential has never been more difficult. Consumers are increasingly diverse, skeptical of marketing, and empowered by digital technologies that easily connect them to others who share their tastes. They co-create the meaning of the brands that shape their lives and play a participatory role in brand management that can make them allies or adversaries. The contemporary brandscape is crowded with competitors vying to stake claims to rich, meaning-laden value propositions that reflect and leverage the zeitgeist. Iconic brands are toppled everyday by young upstarts telling new types of stories in authentic ways. Firms are aggressively buying consumers’ brand loyalty at the same time they are firing their customers. Customer relationship management (CRM) investments have failed to deliver on their promise and are often hurting rather than helping the development of strong consumer-brand relationships. Brand managers are losing control as consumers hijack brand meaning and engage in open-source branding.

This course takes a contemporary view of branding as a collective and collaborative meaning-making process among firms, consumers, and other cultural producers, and of brands as meaning-based, relational assets that must be carefully designed, curated, and negotiated to unlock their considerable value. As branding becomes more participatory, experiential, and experimental, the role of the brand manager requires cultural and relational prowess. Today’s managers must be able to author resonant stories that spark conversations that capture attention, generate engagement, and provide culturally-relevant meaning to consumers. Learnings will focus on how brands and the stories that define them can be crafted and communicated in ways that nurture relationships that create value for both consumers and firms.

Career Focus:

This course is designed for students who plan to create, unlock, or invest in value created through brands in the consumer and retail space. It is appropriate for:

• Marketing professionals charged with creating, nurturing, and managing brand value;

• Entrepreneurs looking to create their own consumer-driven brands;

• Consumer/retail general managers and consultants engaged in stewarding brand strategy; and

• Venture capital, private equity, or investment management investors seeking to identify brand asset potential and value brand equity.
Awards & Honors
Winner of the 2020 Louis W. Stern Award from the American Marketing Association for “Adding Bricks to Clicks: Predicting the Patterns of Cross-Channel Elasticities over Time” (Journal of Marketing, 2012) with Thomas Steenburgh, John Deighton, and Mary Caravella.
Winner of the 2020 Case Centre Award in the Marketing Category for “Predicting Consumer Tastes with Big Data at Gap” (HBS Case 517-115) with Ayelet Israeli.
Included in the WomenInc. Most Influential Corporate Board Directors List for 2019.
Overall winner of the 2019 Case Centre Awards and Competitions for “Accor: Strengthening the Brand with Digital Marketing” with Chekitan S. Dev and Peter O'Connor (HBS Case 315-138).
Recipient of the Robert F. Greenhill Award for Outstanding Contributions to Harvard Business School, 2017–2018.
Awarded the 2016 Private Company Board of the Year by the National Association of Corporate Directors, New England Chapter, along with the other corporate directors of the Amica Mutual Insurance Company.
Won a 2014 Case Centre Award in the Marketing Category for her case with Thomas Steenburgh and Naseem Dahod, “HubSpot: Inbound Marketing and Web 2.0” (HBS Case No. 509-049).
Winner of the 2012 Marketing Science Institute Best Paper Award for articles published in the "Consumer Identities" special issue of the International Journal of Research in Marketing for the article entitled "Defending the Markers of Masculinity: Consumer Resistance to Brand Gender-Bending."
Received the 2011 MBA Award for Teaching Excellence at Simmons School of Management by vote of the graduating MBA students.
Winner of the Best Paper Award for papers presented at the 2008 Association for Consumer Research (ACR) Conference on Gender, Marketing, and Consumer Behavior for the paper entitled "Defending the Markers of Hegemonic Masculinity: Consumer Resistance to Gender-Bending Brand Extensions."
Won the 2006 Wyss Award for Excellence in Doctoral Research.
Nominated for the 2004 Joseph R. Levenson Memorial Teaching Prize for exceptional teaching of undergraduates at Harvard.
Awarded the Harvard University Certificate of Distinction in Teaching in 2003 from the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning for her service as a teaching fellow for the undergraduate course "Social Psychology of Organizations" at Harvard College.
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