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Jennifer L. Aaker

 

Biography

Jennifer Aaker is the General Atlantic Professor of Marketing at the Graduate School of Business, Stanford University. As a social psychologist, Professor Aaker studies time, money, happiness and brands. Her interests span a wide range of research from the psychology of giving to the role of time, money and social media in getting people to do the right thing. She and her coauthors examine what actually makes people happy, as opposed to what they think makes them happy. Her work on the psychology of consumer-brand relationships won the best Journal of Consumer Research article, and her work on culture and emotion has won awards for papers which demonstrates the most potential to contribute significantly to management.

Professor Aaker publishes widely in the leading scholarly journals in psychology and business, and serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Consumer Psychology and the Journal of Marketing Research, and is currently the Associate Editor at the Journal of Consumer Research. Her work has been featured in a variety of media including The Economist, The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Business Week, Forbes, CBS Moneywatch, NPR, Science, Inc and Cosmopolitan.

A sought-after teacher in the field of marketing, Professor Aaker teaches in many of Stanford’s Executive Education programs as well as MBA electives on:

  • The Power of Social Technology
  • Building Innovative Brands
  • How to Tell a Story

Most recently, her research and teaching have focused on how to leverage the power of social media to make a difference. Her class on The Power of Social Technology as well as her upcoming book on the subject reveals how to use them to do something that really matters (“The Dragonfly Effect: Quick, Effective, and Powerful Ways To Use Social Media to Make a Difference”). Her research and case-driven class teaches four key skills (how to think focused, grab attention, engage and enable action), explains how to coordinate them, and demonstrates how to harness social technology to achieve disproportionate impact. Operating as “social change in a box,” Professor Aaker illustrates how these synchronized ideas have been effectively used to create rapid transformations in both non-profit and for-profits communities.

She has received numerous teaching awards at both Stanford University and UCLA, including Distinguished Teaching Award, Citibank Best Teacher Award and George Robbins Best Teacher award. She is on the Board of Directors for Volunteer Match, Board of Re-Imagining Service and orchestrates the Stanford GSB conference, “Small Steps, Big Leaps: The Science of Getting People to Do the Right Thing.”

Jennifer earned her bachelor’s degree in psychology from University of California at Berkeley and her PhD degrees in Marketing (major) and Psychology (minor) from Stanford University in 1995. She joined Anderson School of Business at UCLA as Assistant Professor and returned to Stanford in 1999, where she received tenure in 2001, Full Professor in 2004, and Chaired Professorship in 2005. She was the Xerox Distinguished Professor of Knowledge at Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley (2006-2008) and returned to Stanford Graduate School of Business in 2008.