Barbara Kahn

Most companies try to be good at everything. Kahn helps them decide where they need to be exceptional and where good enough is enough. Sephora transformed beauty shopping by letting customers handle and test the products themselves. Costco competes on low price while turning the trip into a treasure hunt. Both win, in opposite ways, because their customers value different things. Her frameworks turn that judgment into a repeatable strategy.

When Amazon had every company wondering whether it would come for their market next, Kahn was the voice explaining what Amazon was actually doing and how to compete with it. The Shopping Revolution came out of that work and became the guide for the era. That fear has returned in a new form. AI now puts the same capabilities in every competitor's hands, and sameness spreads faster than most companies can differentiate. The question she answered then is the one audiences are asking now.

Kahn is the Patty and Jay H. Baker Professor of Marketing at the Wharton School. She served two terms directing its Baker Retailing Center, where Wharton's research meets the companies living those problems. Across a quarter century, she ranked as the seventh most-published author in the field's most prestigious journals. That matters for one reason: every framework she brings to a stage was tested against evidence first. She also led the Marketing Science Institute, the body where the field sets its biggest research questions.

Her ideas have been tested in rooms where being wrong costs money. She spent thirteen years on the board of Dexcom, a publicly traded medical technology company, serving on its Audit and Compensation Committees. That is governance, not marketing advice. She has testified as an expert witness on marketing and branding in federal and state courts, where her analysis had to survive cross-examination. She ran a business school as Dean at the University of Miami. Audiences get a strategist who has had to make these calls, not only study them.

Her newest work is on attention. Visual Marketing, published in 2025 with the head of Wharton's neuroscience initiative, decodes how customers decide what earns their attention in a market built to exhaust it. She co-hosts Marketing Matters on SiriusXM Business Radio, where she talks with the people running those companies about what shapes customer strategy and competition. She has advised organizations across financial services, healthcare, technology, consumer brands, and retail.

WHY AUDIENCES WILL BE BETTER OFF

• Audiences leave able to make the case for customer experience as a growth investment, not a service cost.
• Audiences leave able to decide whether to compete by saving customers time or by making the time they spend worth spending.
• Audiences leave able to focus investment where being better changes customer choice, and stop overspending where it will not.
• Audiences leave able to see why satisfied customers still leave and what makes them more likely to stay.