Jill Avery
Senior Lecturer of Business Administration, C. Roland Christensen Distinguished Management Educator
Harvard Business School
Jill Avery is a Senior Lecturer of Business Administration and C. Roland Christensen Distinguished Management Educator in the marketing unit at Harvard Business School. Prior to her academic career, she worked in CPG brand management, managing brands for The Gillette Company, Braun Inc., Samuel Adams, and AT&T, and spent time on the agency side of the business as an account executive managing consumer promotions for Pepsi, General Foods, Bristol-Myers, and Citibank.
She remains close to practice through board service as a Corporate Director of the Amica Mutual Insurance Company, an Independent Director at the Kopin Corporation, President Emerita of the Board of Trustees at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and a Trustee at The Boston Ballet. She received the Simmons School of Management’s Award for Teaching Excellence for her MBA teaching, and was awarded a Certificate of Distinction in Teaching at Harvard University for her undergraduate teaching.
She is the author of over 100 journal articles, book chapters, cases, and notes on branding, CRM, and digital marketing. With her co-authors in 2019, she won The Case Centre Overall Award for Accor: Strengthening the Brand with Digital Marketing. In 2020 her co-authored case, Predicting Consumer Tastes with Big Data at Gap, won the Marketing category case award.
Jill's top bestselling cases
Browse Jill's top three bestselling cases during the last year.CEO Art Peck was eliminating his creative directors for The Gap, Old Navy, and Banana Republic brands and promoting a collective creative ecosystem fuelled by the input of big data. Rather than relying on artistic vision, Peck wanted the company to use the mining of big data obtained from Google Analytics and the company's own sales and customer databases to select the next season's assortment.
The launch of the Chase Sapphire Reserve credit card was enthusiastically received by Millennial consumers, a cohort that had previously eluded JPMorgan Chase and its competitors. With the one year anniversary of the launch approaching, managers are focused on retaining customers attracted by a one-time signup bonus of 100,000 reward points and on acquiring new customers now that the bonus had been reduced to 50,000 points.
John Stack was the visionary Head of Digital Transformation at the Tate, a collection of four major art galleries in the UK, including Tate Modern. Stack was working to execute a new digital strategy, one that included digital as a dimension of everything the Tate did, both physically and virtually. This effort was raising important questions about organizational structure, marketing strategy, product and service design, and return on investment.