Marketing is fundamentally concerned with the description and prediction of decision outcomes, involving all aspects of the firm that relates to its customers, competitors, distributors, and business regulators. It is an interdisciplinary field that draws theories and methodologies from a variety of sources including psychology, sociology, mathematics, statistics and economics.
The doctoral program in Marketing is designed to produce scholars. We train our graduates to become academics in a university setting. We aim to produce teachers and researchers. If your interest is consulting, industry or other non-university sector employment, you would be better to pursue a MBA or MSc degree.
Marketing doctoral students take a series of courses, including research methods, marketing theory, consumer behavior, judgment and decision making, experimental design and others drawn from non-business areas such as economics, psychology, statistics and sociology. Other aspects of the program are tailored to fit the student’s own research, teaching and professional interests.
In the marketing seminars, students normally participate in sessions related to their areas of expertise and research interests. Students consider recent scholarly work in the field, develop research approaches, increase their understanding of conceptualizations and models, and develop the ability to solve managerial problems in marketing. The seminars are sequenced so that in one seminar you will be with others who have entered the program earlier, and in a second seminar, with those who enter the program after you.
Areas of Research Focus
- Psychology of money
- Financial decision-making
- Gambling
- Experiential consumption and emotions
- Social influence
- Big data and machine learning
- B2B and B2C relationships
- Branding
- Marketing strategy
- Addiction
- Temporal perception and consumption
- Self-control and consumption
- Political marketing
- Charitable behaviour
PhD Student Opportunities
A small but highly competitive cohort of students is accepted into the marketing stream of the PhD program every year. Students have varied experiences coming from industry, Master's programs, and government. Supervisory relationships among faculty members and students are close and begin soon after entering the program. As such, it is recommended that applications are tailored to highlight alignment with specific faculty members and their corresponding areas of research focus, which are listed above and available on faculty webpages (e.g., June Cotte, Rod Duclos, Guneet Kaur Nagpal, Miranda Goode, Kirk Kristofferson, Zhe Zhang).
Frequent interactions allow marketing faculty to personalize students’ coursework and to guide development of a research project pipeline that merges overlapping interests with their unique backgrounds. In addition to Ivey’s competitive internal funding structure, marketing PhD students have a strong record of securing additional external funding, both provincially and federally, and our graduates attain tenure track positions at attractive institutions in Canada, Unites States, and Europe. The Marketing group welcomes applications from qualified candidates.
