STUDENT FACULTY ADVISOR

Professor Americus Reed is a Father, Professor, Researcher, Entrepreneur, Speaker, Angel Investor, Fitness Geek, Musician and Student of life. Unlike other educators and motivational speakers, he brings all of his own identities to bare to create a right brain and left brain fusion of deep scholarly research and pop-culture “edutainment.” His limitless passion energizes his work as the world’s leading “identity theorist.” His deliverables are designed to inform, advise and collaborate with the world’s obsessively intellectually curious individuals and most cutting edge organizations. Americus’ calling is to help them diagnose, identify and develop their unique gifts inherent in their own identities, so that they may flourish and thrive in all aspects of their lives.

He is the Whitney M. Young, Jr. Professor of Marketing at the Wharton School. He brings 25 years of research, teaching and consulting experience in leveraging deep social psychological analysis on how the topic of “Identity” and the complexity of how a person, organization, brand, or service creates self-expression and how this interfaces with various domains of business (Accelerating Growth, Creating True Loyalty, Work Identity and Organizational Culture and Calling, Persuasion and consumer targeting, and Brand Crisis).

His primary research and consulting areas are in brand equity and Identity Loyalty – the study of creating and fostering “brand communities” that transcend the utilitarian aspects of products to actualize iconic levels of symbolic identity and self-expression; connect to deep levels of emotional and social affiliation, and cultivate lifelong relationships with intermediate customers and end consumers. In 2005, his academic work in this area received honorable mention for the prestigious Robert Ferber Award for academic impact in the Journal of Consumer Research (JCR) and in 2009 he received JCR’s Best Paper Award. Americus describes the power of branding in this TEDx conversation. He has authored more than 50 articles, book chapters and cases on the topic. He has been featured on CNN, CNBC, Forbes, Wall Street Journal, Huffington Post, New York Times, NPR, the Hidden Brain Podcast and Knowledge at Wharton. He hosts a Podcast called Marketing Matters which airs live on Wednesdays on Wharton’s Sirius XM Channel 132 Business Radio. He teaches customer analysis, branding and consumer psychology to undergraduate, graduate, doctoral and executive students.