Marketing Professor Champions Critical Thinking and Experiential Learning

During three decades of teaching, Eunkyu Lee, professor of marketing and associate dean for global initiatives, has witnessed marketing practices and consumer behavior impacted by revolutionary forces, including the creation of the internet, the development of smartphones, the founding of Amazon and, now, the adoption of AI.

“Technology reshapes market forces, which are dynamic and always changing,” he says. “The importance of business education, especially in marketing, is striking the right balance between introducing students to emerging trends and techniques and providing a theoretical foundation for systematic thinking as the market environment keeps changing.”

One of the key tenets Lee wants students to take away from his classroom: It depends. “You should not make a quick conclusion about what is the right marketing strategy or marketing action,” says Lee. “Seeing a company having success using one strategy doesn’t mean that is the right strategy for your product or company. It depends on a variety of
factors, which opens up a whole range of analysis to synthesize to find the best answer for that particular case, that particular product, that particular company,” he adds.

Lee believes the best way to learn is experientially, the impetus behind the popular Brand Management course he created. Offered to both undergraduate and graduate students, the course is built around a computer simulation in which students form teams to represent the brand management team of a multimillion-dollar company. Through the course of a semester, students develop and manage brands and are accountable for the financial performance of the company.

“The course plays a very important role in the marketing curriculum of the Whitman School because students have to utilize the knowledge and skills they have acquired from pretty much every other marketing course,” he says.

Creating a dynamic learning environment has earned Lee numerous teaching accolades during his 25 years at the Whitman School, including the Dean’s Recognition of Teaching Excellence and the Graduate Faculty of the Year Award. Last fall, he was named one of the nation’s top 50 undergraduate business professors by Poets&Quants, a website dedicated to business education.

Lee attributes his success in the classroom to his passion for marketing and his genuine love for teaching. “You can’t fake that,” he says. He’s also deeply invested in the student experience.“The student body is very diverse, and students learn in different ways,” he says. “I try to make the classroom interactive and to present information in multiple ways. Some
students may be more visual than verbal; others may respond better to a more abstract explanation,” Lee says.

He also focuses on making students feel respected. “I want to create a safe environment so that students can focus on learning rather than being distracted by anxiety,” says Lee. “Whether they end up earning an A or a low grade, that’s just reflective of their performance in that particular classroom. But as far as their potential goes, I tell them they are all A
students in my mind.”

A native of Seoul, South Korea, Lee majored in business as an undergraduate at Seoul National University and came to the United States to earn an MBA at Duke University. He initially focused his study on finance with plans for
a career on Wall Street. In the midst of a promising interview process for a major Wall Street firm, however, he became riveted by his marketing course. “Marketing is very diverse and dynamic. No two cases or problems are the same, and it really challenged me to use the whole range of my intellectual capabilities, thinking strategically, creatively and analytically, ” he says.

Lee set his Wall Street dreams aside and remained at Duke to earn a Ph.D. in marketing. He held faculty positions at Seattle University and the University of British Columbia and was recruited to the Whitman School after attending
a marketing conference held at Syracuse in 1999.

In addition to distinguishing himself in the classroom, Lee is a leading marketing scholar who develops mathematical models to analyze strategic issues in distribution channels and market competition. His research has
appeared in top academic journals—such as the Journal of Marketing Research, Marketing Science, Management Science and the Journal of Retailing—and he speaks on those topics to industry and academia. His current projects study the impact of artificial intelligence in advertising and consumer decision processes.

Lee has served as chair of the marketing department and director of the Ph.D. program at Whitman. Since 2018, he has served as associate dean for global initiatives, a position created to help Whitman lead the way in
global education and global engagement. In his position as associate dean for global education, Lee worked to
give students opportunities to travel abroad, many times hosting these trips himself to East Asia and other regions.

“The business world is so globalized, you cannot really think about business education and business research without having a global business understanding,” Lee says. “It’s a must for everybody.”

By Renee Gearhart Levy