Overview
Marketing is the study of how organisations interact with customers (and vice versa). As such, it focuses on how organisations create value for customers and capture value from customers in return.
The academic discipline of Marketing is divided into 3 broad areas or sub-fields:
- marketing strategy
- marketing modelling
- consumer behaviour
In the Marketing group you’ll find scholars from each of these sub-fields.
Professor Jaideep Prabhu talks about the Marketing pathway
The pathway
To start on the Marketing pathway you must take one of the following 9-month masters programmes:
MPhil in Strategy, Marketing, Operations and Organisational Behaviour
Essential reading
Download detailed information about the 9-month + 4-year programme structure and content.
Research areas
You will find that the context for study within the Marketing pathway at Cambridge Judge Business School is broad and can be divided into three main sub-fields: marketing strategy, marketing modelling, and consumer behaviour.
Our group members publish in leading international journals in areas such as marketing and innovation in emerging markets, experimental economics, econometrics, game theory and industrial organisation, innovation, unstructured and big data, and behavioural decision making.
- Study of a firm’s interactions with its customers (and other external stakeholders) from the perspective of the firm’s managers.
- Quantitative analysis of empirical data is used to address questions that link a firm’s performance with its actions and those of its managers vis-à-vis external stakeholders.
Scholars in this sub-field:
- Ahmed Khwaja
- Jaideep Prabhu
- Eden Yin
- Economic analysis of the interactions between firms and consumers.
- Use of analytical modelling with a game theory approach, the econometric analysis of empirical data and experimental economics methods to address research questions.
Scholars in this sub-field:
- Ahmed Khwaja
- Dominique Lauga
- Shasha Lu
- The psychology of how consumers think, feel and reason as well as choose between different. marketplace alternatives.
- Researchers draw heavily upon the theories and methodologies of experimental psychology and experimental social psychology in particular.
Scholars in this sub-field:
- Dominique Lauga
Examples of current research
The context for study within the Marketing pathway is broad. To give you more of a taste, the phenomena and research questions currently being investigated by our faculty and PhD students include:
- the marketing practices of micro-entrepreneurs in low-income economies
- the extent to which consumers are able to wait strategically for future price markdowns and how this is affected by product scarcity
- how moral identity impact preferences for donating time vs money to charity
What we expect from you
You will need to have a first class bachelors degree or equivalent. In some cases you will need to have a masters degree from a highly regarded university and to have performed within the top 5% of your class. Many applicants have first degrees in economics, mathematics, psychology, engineering or the sciences, however we also consider applicants with a humanities degree.
You will demonstrate a high level of commitment to an academic career in a business school as well as a desire to engage with external organisations.
You will have to provide evidence of excellent writing skills and strong evidence of quantitative ability, either through results in statistics and calculus courses at university level or through GRE results. Practical management experience is welcome but not essential.
For more details, please see the academic requirements for the:
MPhil in Strategy, Marketing, Operations and Organisational Behaviour
What you can expect from us
Prepare to start your exciting academic research career at Cambridge Judge.
- Become part of our team from the outset, you will be treated as a junior colleague rather than a student.
- Experience an apprenticeship in the best sense as the Marketing subject group works with you and trains you to become an independent researcher with an exciting research programme.
- Produce a portfolio of academic papers that will help you succeed in the job market and gain a junior faculty position following your PhD.
- Work with faculty members on joint research projects for publication in leading academic journals.
- Learn from a series of courses focused on research methodology and the foundations of the discipline.
- Take more advanced research seminars, where you will learn to critique papers and shape and position your own work as a significant contribution to the academic literature in Marketing.
- You will develop a coherent and innovative research programme that is relevant for solving real-world problems, with the support of the Marketing subject group.
- Your research may require you to engage with external organisations directly. This engagement will help you gain access to unique data, which in turn will help you shed new light on ongoing academic debates.
- Alternatively, you may focus on collecting data in laboratory settings and work with student subjects.
PhD supervisors
Your principal supervisor will be a senior academic, often a Professor or an Associate Professor, from within the Marketing pathway. You will benefit from their guidance and counsel throughout the programme, and beyond: in helping you to succeed in the job market and in gaining a faculty position at a leading business school. Your principal supervisor will take an active role in your research programme and will assemble a group of faculty (your advisory committee) who will co-author papers with you.
Take a look at the faculty who may serve as your principal supervisor and view their research interests:
Ahmed Khwaja
Professor of Marketing, Business and Public Enterprise
Research interests
Ahmed Khwaja researches marketing strategy; health care markets, innovation and market entry; customer and employee relationship management in service industries; pharmaceutical R&D and retail chain expansion and growth. Methodological interests include dynamic strategic games; consumer choice dynamics; asymmetric information and incomplete markets; and simulation-based econometric methods.
Dominique Lauga
Professor of Marketing
Not available to take incoming PhD students in October 2026
Research interests
Dominique Lauga researches marketing modelling and behavioural economics. Research interests centre on strategic interactions between firms and consumers, with a special focus on product development, pricing, advertising and product reviews.
Shasha Lu
Associate Professor in Marketing
Not available to take incoming PhD students in October 2026
Research interests
Shashu Lu researches marketing modelling and customer analysis using unstructured data (e.g. images, videos). Her research combines machine learning and computer vision techniques with marketing models to improve business practice in the digital age. Research interests include: artificial empathy, digital advertising, visual content and visual product design and optimisation, visual data privacy, visual-based data mining and marketing strategies. The context of her research involves a range of industries such as fashion, online dating, interior design, entertainment, and advertising.
Professor Jaideep Prabhu
Professor of Marketing
Jawaharlal Nehru Professor of Indian Business and Enterprise
Research interests
Jaideep Prabhu researches international business, marketing, strategy and innovation. Specific interests include: cross-national issues concerning the antecedents and consequences of radical innovation in high-technology contexts such as banking, pharmaceuticals and biotechnology; the role of firm culture in driving innovation in firms across nations; how multinational firms organise their innovation activities worldwide; the forces that drive R&D location decisions and the factors that influence the performance implications of these decisions; the internationalisation of firms from emerging markets; and innovation in emerging markets.
Eden Yin
Associate Professor in Marketing
Research interests
Eden Yin researches innovation and new product growth in technology industries, and internationalisation strategies for firms from emerging markets.
Marketing faculty
Learn more about the faculty that teach on this pathway.