About Dean Fournier

Susan Fournier is Allen Questrom Professor and Dean of the Questrom School of Business at Boston University and Professor of Marketing. Under her leadership, the school pursues a mission of developing business leaders who leverage the power of business to create value for the world.

Susan is in her 30th year as a marketing academic, 19 of these at Questrom. She is the school’s first woman dean and its first academic dean in over 40 years. Prior to Questrom, Susan served on the faculties of Harvard Business School and Dartmouth Tuck School, and prior to her academic career, spent 10 years in industry as VP at Young & Rubicam Advertising and in market research and management roles at Polaroid Corporation and Yankelovich Clancy Shulman. She earned her PhD from the University of Florida, Master’s from Penn State University, and Undergraduate from UMass Amherst. She is President and Founder of the Institute for Brands & Brand Relationships and remains active in the consulting space.

Susan is a member of the 30-member board of AACSB International, the accrediting organization for business schools. In 2022 she was honored with the Association for Consumer Research (ACR) Fellow Award, the highest honor recognizing the career contributions of consumer researchers. She is also recognized by the Society of Consumer Psychology for her Distinguished Scientific Contributions to the field. Susan’s research on brands, brand communities, and the relationships consumers build with brands is among the most cited and respected research in the marketing academic community. Her seminal 1998 publication, “Consumers and their Brands,” has been cited over 12,000 times and forms the foundation for modern work on branding and consumer behavior. Susan received five best article awards for her work. Her collection of published research on topics including customer satisfaction, consumer’s conflicted relationships with technology, the creation of shareholder value through brand building, the management of person-brands, and brand management in an era of heightened socio-political risks registers over 34,000 citations, ranking her among the top 2% of all scientific researchers on this impact metric. Susan has also authored dozens of best-selling case studies that bring her research into the business schools across the globe.