Jan-Benedict Steenkamp

Professor of Marketing

Jan-Benedict E.M. Steenkamp specializes in global marketing, branding, emerging markets and strategy.

He is the author “Global Brand Strategy: World-Wise Marketing in the Age of Branding” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).

He also wrote “Private Label Strategy: How to Meet the Store Brand Challenge” and “Brand Breakout: How Emerging Market Brands Will Go Global,” which have been translated into Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese and Polish. “Brand Breakout” was selected as a best business book in globalization for 2013 by Booz & Co.’s Strategy + Business.

Dr. Steenkamp has written 10 cases on companies and brands from emerging markets. An award-winning researcher, he has also written over 150 scholarly publications, and his work has received over 35,000 citations.

He is co-founder of AiMark, a global center involving Fortune 500 companies that spearheads the BG 20 project uncovering drivers of sustainable brand growth.

One of the world’s leading thinkers on global strategy and branding, Dr. Steenkamp has taught, consulted and given executive seminars on all continents. His work has been featured in Harvard Business ReviewThe Wall Street JournalFinancial TimesThe EconomistThe New York TimesBloomberg Businessweek and newspapers in Europe, China, India and South Korea. He has been interviewed on television and radio in the U.S., Europe, South Africa, India and China.

He has worked on international lawsuits and trade disputes involving branding and private labels with the Brattle Group and the international law firms King & Spalding LLP, Sidley & Austin LLP, and Shook, Hardy & Bacon LLP.

Dr. Steenkamp serves as associate editor or editorial board member of all top marketing journals and is past editor of the International Journal of Research in Marketing.

The Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences awarded him the Muller lifetime prize for “exceptional achievements in the area of the behavioral and social sciences.” It was the first time the prize was awarded to a researcher in any area of business administration. He also received lifetime achievement honors from the American Marketing Association, the European Marketing Academy and the Society for Marketing Advances

Dr. Steenkamp has taught at universities in Austria, Belgium, China, India, the Netherlands, Singapore, Spain, South Africa, U.K. and the U.S.

He received his PhD, master’s and bachelor’s degrees, all summa cum laude, from Wageningen University in the Netherlands, and a Doctor Honoris Causa (Honorary Doctorate) from Aarhus University, Denmark.


Recent Publications

August 1, 2018

While previous research has investigated various drivers of electronic word of mouth (eWOM), the firm's offline competitive environment has not been considered. The authors explore this new horizon and examine the different effects of firms’ geographic concentration, or agglomeration, on the volume of eWOM received. They distinguish three types of agglomeration—density agglomeration (number of firms in the industry in an area), product agglomeration (overlap in product types offered by the firms in the area), and temporal agglomeration (overlap in moment of consumption).

Jan-Benedict Steenkamp

January 1, 2017

With the explosion of Internet users, growing from 360 million (5.9 % of the world’s population) in 2000 to 3.4 billion (46.4 %) in 2016, the digital space is reshaping how organizations go global with their brands. Any chapter written about digital branding strategies runs the risk of obsolescence before it hits the printer. Specific digital platforms and tools for global brand building change rapidly over time.

Jan-Benedict Steenkamp