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 an authority on brand management, customer relationship management (CRM), and digital marketing. Prior to her academic career, she worked in consumer packaged goods brand management, managing brands for The Gillette Company, Braun Inc., Samuel Adams, and AT&T, and spent time on the agency side of the business, as an account executive managing consumer promotions for Pepsi, General Foods, Bristol-Myers, and Citibank. 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, President of the Board of Trustees at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and a former Trustee of St. Paul's School. 

She currently teaches two courses, Marketing to first-year MBAs and Creating Brand Value to second-year MBAs. She has also taught executives in Harvard Business School's Taking Marketing Digital, Strategic Marketing Management, Global Strategic Management, Driving Digital Strategy, Launching New Ventures, and Transforming Customer Experiences open enrollment executive education programs and in custom executive programs 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. 

In the past, she has taught marketing management, brand management, integrated marketing communications, consumer behavior, strategic decision making, social psychology of organizations, and FIELD (Field Immersion Experiences for Leadership) in the MBA and undergraduate programs at HBS, Harvard College, Boston University, Northeastern University, and Simmons College. She received the Simmons School of Management’s Award for Teaching Excellence for her MBA teaching. She was awarded a Certificate of Distinction in Teaching at Harvard College for her undergraduate teaching. She is a 2018 recipient of the Robert F. Greenhill award for service to the HBS community. 

She is the author of over 100 journal articles, book chapters, cases, and notes on branding, CRM, and digital marketing. Her work 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 have been published 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 doctoral dissertation on online brand communities 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 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 earned an honorable mention for best articles published in the Journal of Consumer Research in 2011. 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.

Her field research and teaching cases have sold over 1 million copies and are taught at the top global business schools, placing her as #14 on the list of bestselling case authors worldwide, and include cases on Kraft-Heinz, Nestle, L'Oreal, Porsche, Pepsi, Budweiser, Marriott/Starwood, Longchamp, Nike, Glossier, Hubble, Away, J.C. Penney, EMC, JP Morgan Chase, Shiseido, Tate Modern, Christie's, Peapod, Brandless, OneFineStay, The Park Hotels, Eileen Fisher, Shinola, and the Denver Museum of Nature & Science. The Case Centre awarded her HubSpot case the Marketing Award in 2014, her Accor Hotels case the Overall Case Award in 2019, and her GAP case the Marketing Award in 2020.  

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