Monday, June 20, 2022
Please join the Wharton Club of Boston on June 20th, 2022 from 6:30pm-7:30pm for an exciting discussion with Wharton Professor Dr. Barbara Kahn as she talks about her recently revised book, The Shopping Revolution, Updated and Expanded Edition: How Retailers Succeed in an Era of Endless Disruption Accelerated by COVID-19. There will be a Q&A discussion at the end of the talk, so come prepared with all of your questions about how retail has changed and where the industry might be headed!
Book Overview:
Wharton professor Barbara E. Kahn examines the companies that have been most successful during a tsunami of change in the industry. She discusses what we can learn from these companies’ ascendance and continued transformation in the face of unprecedented challenges. For example:
- How Amazon became the retailer of choice for a large portion of the US population, and how other companies have chosen to work with them or have to compete against them
- How Walmart beat out other grocers in the late 1990s to become the leader in food retailing, and how they must pivot to hold their leadership position today
- How Warby Parker dared to compete against Luxottica in the lucrative eyewear business, and what that can tell start-ups about how to carve out a niche against a Goliath
- How Sephora drew away customers from once-dominant department stores to become the go-to retailers for beauty products.
Kahn argues we are just witnessing the start of the radical changes in retail that have been hastened by the pandemic and will revolutionize shopping in every way. Building on these insights, Kahn offers a framework that any company can use to create a competitive strategy to survive and thrive in today’s—and tomorrow’s—retail environment.
About our Speaker:
Barbara E. Kahn is the Patty and Jay H. Baker Professor of Marketing at The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. She served two terms as the director of the Jay H. Baker Retailing Center. Prior to rejoining Wharton in 2011, Barbara served as the dean and Schein Professor of Marketing at the School of Business Administration, University of Miami, Miami, Florida. Before becoming dean at UM, she spent 17 years at Wharton as Silberberg Professor of Marketing. She was also vice dean of the Wharton undergraduate program.
Barbara is an internationally recognized scholar on retailing, variety seeking, brand loyalty, product assortment and design, and consumer and patient decision-making. She has published more than 75 articles in leading academic journals. She is the author of The Shopping Revolution: How Successful Retailers Win Customers in an Era of Endless Disruption and Global Brand Power: Leveraging Branding for Long-Term Growth. She is also the coauthor of Grocery Revolution: The New Focus on the Consumer.
Barbara has been elected president of the Association for Consumer Research, elected president of the Journal of Consumer Research (JCR) Policy Board, and selected as a Marketing Science Institute trustee. She was also an associate editor at JCR, Journal of Marketing, and Marketing Science. She has recently been elected as a fellow for both the Association of Consumer Research and the Society of Consumer Psychology. Barbara received her PhD, MBA, and MPhil from Columbia University, and her BA from the University of Rochester.
