Lavin Exclusive Speaker
Markus Giesler is something of a rockstar in the world of business academia, and not just because he regularly consults for top-tier brands like Apple, Google, and BMW. Named one of the best business professors under 40, Gielser is actively turning the traditional world of marketing on its head by using sociological insights—rather than economic research—to design better markets and customer experiences. In talks, this marketing firecracker shows us how to leverage technology and culture to create a captivating customer journey that is truly greater than the sum of its parts.
Markus Giesler created two of the most sought-after electives at York University’s Schulich School of Business. The first, the wildly popular Entertainment Marketing, is the longest-standing course in the school’s BBA program. The second, “Customer Experience Design,” is downright historic: it is the world’s first MBA course on customer experience, and the only marketing course to be endorsed by the American Marketing Association. Giesler is a pioneer of the academic theory “Big Design”, which suggests that a market's evolving economic, technological, and cultural fabric shapes—and is shaped by—multiple actors and institutions. In his class, and through his work as the Director of the Big Design Lab, he uses this multifaceted approach to understanding what drives product success. “Stop looking at needs. Stop looking at the psychologically oriented idea of what the consumer wants. That’s almost Fruedian,” Giesler explains. “Start developing a more sociologically oriented understanding of how cultures change, and how new energies can be captured and turned into economic capital.”
Named “one of the best recognized experts studying high-technology consumer behavior” by WIRED, and dubbed a “young business school star professor on the rise” by CNN, it’s unsurprising that Giesler is in high demand among business leaders, entrepreneurs, and policy makers. Rational concerns about consumer behavior rarely tell the whole story, he says. Instead, his groundbreaking talks help us unravel the deeply intimate, and deeply ingrained, motivations for consumption that lie beneath the surface.
Giesler is an associate editor at the Journal of Marketing and on the editorial review boards of the Journal of Consumer Research, Consumption, Markets and Culture, Marketing Letters, and Business & Society. His research is frequently cited in The New York Times, BusinessWeek, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and WIRED, among others.