Leonard M. Lodish

The Samuel R Harrell Professor, Professor of Marketing; Vice Dean, the Program for Social Impact; Co Founder and Leader, the Global Consulting Practicum; Faculty Advisor, Wharton West

 

Wharton Faculty > Biography

Leonard M. Lodish is the Samuel R. Harrell Professor in the Marketing Department of the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, where he has been since 1968. He received a Ph.D. (Marketing and Operations Research) from Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management in 1968 and an A.B. (Mathematics) from Kenyon College in 1965. He has been at Wharton since 1968 where he was department chair from 1984-1988 and 1991-1992. He has also been a visiting Professor at the Harvard Business School. He is also Vice Dean for Wharton West, Wharton's San Francisco campus since 2001.

At Wharton, Professor Lodish co-founded, in (1979), and is Leader of the Wharton Global Consulting Practicum that has subsidiary partnerships in Israel (Tel Aviv University), Chile (Universidad Adolfo Ibanez), Peru (Universidad del Pacifico) , Colombia (Universidad de Los Andes), China (Fudan and Beida Universities), and India (Indian School of Business). Through the program, groups of MBA's at Wharton work with client companies and MBA students at the partner institution on real projects to either help the foreign client company succeed at marketing in the U.S., or help a U.S. firm succeed in the partner's country. In 1995, he initiated, developed, and currently teaches Wharton's Entrepreneurial Marketing MBA Course and wrote Entrepreneurial Marketing: Lessons from Wharton's Pioneering MBA Course, with Howard L. Morgan, and Amy Kallianpur, published in 2001 by John Wiley.

Professor Lodish's primary research and consulting areas are in entrepreneurial marketing, strategic and tactical marketing resource planning, marketing decision support systems, and applications in firm/marketing strategy, sales force, advertising, and promotion planning. In 1987 he led a team that won the Franz Edelman Award for Management Science Practical Achievement from the Institute of Management Sciences for a sales force sizing and deployment model responsible for a sales increase of $25 million annually at Syntex Laboratories. This was the first time in the 16 years of the competition that this $6000 prize was awarded to a Marketing entry. He has published over 50 articles, is active as an editor in leading marketing and management science journals, and is the author of The Advertising and Promotion Challenge: Vaguely Right or Precisely Wrong, published by Oxford University Press.

Professor Lodish has developed models and decision support systems that have been syndicated to worldwide use. They include MEDIAC® for media planning, CALLPLAN® for sales force deployment, and PROMOTER® and PROMOTIONSCAN® for promotion planning and evaluation. He led a consortium of most major consumer packaged goods manufacturers, leading advertising agencies, and the major U.S. T.V. networks in a comprehensive analysis of 381 real world split cable TV experiments entitled "How T.V. Advertising Works" which appeared as the lead article in Journal of Marketing Research in August 1995 and in 1996 won the American Marketing Association's new Paul E. Green award for the article in the journal which is most likely to have an impact on marketing practice. In 2000 this article was also awarded the Odell award for the article in the journal that had the most impact after five years and was also judged the best article after five years by the American Marketing Association's Advertising Special Interest Group.

As a part time entrepreneur, Professor Lodish co-founded Management Decision Systems, Inc. (MDS) in 1967 with $2000 of initial equity capital. In 1985 MDS's, 300 employees, merged with Information Resources, Inc. to become a premier international decision support and marketing data supplier. He also was co-owner and co-founder of Shadow Broadcast Services in 1991 that was sold to Westwood One, Inc. in 1998.

He is a Corporate Director of public companies: Franklin Electronic Publishers, Inc., and J&J Snack Foods, Inc. He also is a director or advisory board member of private companies including PVTEL, 1800DIAPERS, Universal AD, and First Flavor.