Vanitha Swaminathan will serve as president of the American Marketing Association’s Academic Council

Vanitha Swaminathan, the Thomas Marshall Professor of Marketing at the Joseph M. Katz Graduate School of Business, will serve as President of American Marketing Association’s Academic Council from through June 2019.

Swaminathan, who joined Pitt in 2002, is the director of the Katz Center for Branding. Her research focuses on branding strategy and the conditions that foster consumer-brand relationships. Her research investigates how firms can successfully design brand strategies such as co-branding, brand extensions, brand acquisitions, marketing alliances to strengthen customer loyalty as well as firm stock market performance. More recently, her focus is on understanding how brand managers can leverage the power of social media to build stronger relationships with customers.

As president of the council, Swaminathan will lead the 12-member group that represents the diversity of scholarly interests in managerial, behavioral, modeling and public policy perspective with attention to strategic marketing implications.