Barbara Kahn is an internationally recognized marketing, branding, and retailing expert. Professor Kahn specializes in variety-seeking behavior, brand loyalty and brand management, product assortment and design, price promotions, and consumer and medical patient decision-making, especially in the context of uncertainty or ambiguity.
As an expert witness, Professor Kahn has testified on marketing, branding, and retailing issues arising in antitrust, intellectual property, finance, and securities litigation. She has deposition experience and has provided testimony in federal and state courts.
In her research, Professor Kahn analyzes a range of consumer behavior and marketing strategy issues, with an emphasis on product assortment planning, product perception, customization, and customer relationship management. She examines the psychological impact of product display and variety, as well as how consumers process visual versus verbal information. Professor Kahn studies the influence of emotional reactions and efficacy beliefs on service experiences, including in medical and financial services industries. Her work also explores multichannel retailing environments, applies consumer neuroscience to marketing, and examines the evolving dynamics of healthcare delivery and consumer health behaviors.
Professor Kahn has published dozens of articles in top academic journals. She was associate editor at the Journal of Consumer Research, the Journal of Marketing, and Marketing Science and has served on the editorial boards of all major marketing journals. Professor Kahn speaks frequently at academic and professional conferences and at leading universities and research laboratories.
Professor Kahn is the author or coauthor of multiple books, including Visual Marketing: A Practical Guide, The Shopping Revolution: How Successful Retailers Win Customers in an Era of Endless Disruption Accelerated by COVID-19, Global Brand Power: Leveraging Branding for Long-Term Growth, Advances in Consumer Research, and Grocery Revolution: The New Focus on the Consumer. Her research has also been featured on CNN, CNBC, Forbes, the Hidden Brain podcast, NPR, the New York Times, Politico, Vox, and the Wall Street Journal.
At the Wharton School, Professor Kahn teaches undergraduate, graduate, and executive education courses on visual marketing, strategic brand management, consumer behavior, and statistics. She has been honored multiple times for teaching excellence and received the prestigious David W. Hauck Award for Outstanding Teaching in the Undergraduate Division. In addition, she directed Wharton’s Jay H. Baker Retailing Center and spent four years as vice dean of the undergraduate program.
Previously, Professor Kahn served both as dean and Schein Family Professor of Marketing at the Miami Herbert Business School, University of Miami. Before that, she was a member of the faculty at UCLA Anderson School of Management.
For over a decade, Professor Kahn has held a secondary appointment in the University of Pennsylvania’s Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy and the Perelman School of Medicine. Her visiting scholar appointments include terms at the University of Tokyo, the University of Sydney, Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, and New York University’s Stern School of Business.