Leonard Lodish

Leonard M. Lodish is Professor of Marketing and Samuel R Harrell Professor Emeritus in the Marketing Department of the Wharton School, the University of Pennsylvania and Leader of the Wharton Global Consulting Practicum (GCP) that has subsidiary partnerships with leading business schools in Australia, Israel, Chile, Peru, China, Taiwan, India, UAE, France, and Spain.  Through the GCP program, groups of Wharton MBA's work with MBA students at the partner institution on real projects to help a foreign client company leverage a relationship with North America or a North American firm leverage a relationship with the partner country. Len was the initial Vice Dean for Wharton’s San Francisco campus from 20012009 and is currently Senior Advisor and Mentor to the Venture Initiation Program in San Francisco. He was also the founding Wharton Vice Dean for Social Impact from 20092012.

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.

As a part time entrepreneur, Professor Lodish cofounded Management Decision Systems, Inc. (MDS) in 1967 with $4000 of initial equity capital.  In 1985 (after raising no other outside equity) MDS's, 300 employees, merged with Information Resources, Inc. to become a premier international decision support and marketing data supplier. He was a corporate director of public companies Information Resources from 19862003, Franklin Electronic Publishers from 19922009, and J&J Snack Foods from 19922013.  He also was coowner and cofounder of Shadow Broadcast Services in 1991 that was sold to Westwood One, Inc. in 1998. He is currently a strategic advisor to First Round Capital, Leadedge Capital, Blumberg Capital, Lumia Capital, Vintage Venture Funds, and Mentor Tech Funds. Len cofounded Musketeer Capital in 2014 to advise and invest in Entrepreneurial Ventures.

Len also is or was a director or advisory board member of private companies – Compete.com, DVtel, Diapers.com (now Quidsi and part of Amazon), Milo.com (now part of Ebay), Notehall Inc (now a subsidiary of Chegg, Inc.), Oxicool, Sight Machine, InfoScout, Realfood Works, Brad’s Raw Chips, Powergetics,Inc, (now STEM), and Totspot,  Len was the first outside director of Diapers.com which was the fastest growing Internet retailer for 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, and 2009 and was sold to Amazon.com for over $500 million in 2011. Len was also the first outside director of Milo.com that was sold in 2010 to eBay for over $70 million after only 2 years in business. Professor Lodish has consulted with many major firms world wide, including Procter and Gamble, Anheuser Busch, Syntex Laboratories, Merck and Company, McNeil Consumer Products Company, the Campbells’ Soup Company, Bentley Systems, Inc., Merrill Lynch, the CocaCola Company, and Walsh/PMSI.

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. In 2007 Wharton Publishing published Marketing that Works: How Entrepreneurial Marketing can Add Sustainable Value to Any Sized Company, written by Len, Howard Morgan, and Shellye Archambeau.  “Marketing that Works…” was revised in 2015 with Jeffrey Babin as an additional author and published by Pearson. Len has published over 60 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. Len is also the cofounder and codirector of the WhartonINSEAD “Leading the Effective Sales Force” executive program which is delivered each year in Singapore, Fontainebleau, and Philadelphia and has been running for over 40 years.

In 1987 Len 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.

Professor Lodish has developed models and decision support systems that have been syndicated to worldwide use.  They include MEDIAC^® for media planning, CALLPLAN^® and ALLOC^® 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 first Paul E. Green award for the article in the journal which was 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. An update to the study published in 2007 won the best article award from the editors of Journal of Advertising Research.

Len 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.

In 1996 Len and his wife Susan pedaled their tandem bicycle across the U.S., and since then have done long distance bicycle rides each year which have raised over $1,700,000 for the A.L.S. (Lou Gehrig’s Disease) Association.  Len is a licensed sailplane pilot and ardent bicycle commuter.

Knowledge @ Wharton

• Amazon vs. Walmart: Which One Will Prevail?, Knowledge @ Wharton 06/27/2017
• How (Not) to Name a Company in the Digital Era, Knowledge @ Wharton 07/13/2016
• The Promise — and Perils — of Dynamic Pricing, Knowledge @ Wharton 02/23/2016
• ‘Making the Pie Bigger’: The Power of Good Relationships, Knowledge @ Wharton 03/27/2015
• How Binational Innovation Can Lead to ‘Continuous Payback’, Knowledge @ Wharton 07/04/2014
• In Amazon and Walmart’s Battle for Dominance, Who Loses Out?, Knowledge @ Wharton 11/13/2013
• What Eyewear Startup Warby Parker Sees That Others Don’t, Knowledge @ Wharton 05/08/2013
• When Retailers Make Strange Bedfellows, Knowledge @ Wharton 07/13/2012
• Etsy Seeks Scale without Losing Its ‘Street Fair’ Aesthetic, Knowledge @ Wharton 05/09/2012
• Changes Needed at Avon Are More Than Cosmetic, Knowledge @ Wharton 04/25/2012
• The Israeli Innovation Enhancing Your iPhone…, Knowledge @ Wharton 01/26/2012
• Food for Thought, Knowledge @ Wharton 10/03/2011
• New Retail Strategies: Offering a Better Fit for Today’s Careful Consumers, Knowledge @ Wharton 08/31/2011
• The World’s Top Cycling Team Has It All, Knowledge @ Wharton 08/15/2011
• Manystop Shopping? How Niche Retailers Are Thriving on Internet 2.0, Knowledge @ Wharton 05/11/2011
• Marketing Keds to a New Generation of Feet, Knowledge @ Wharton 02/24/2011
• Israel’s PicScout: Where RiskTaking and Entrepreneurial Drive Are Part of the DNA, Knowledge @ Wharton 01/12/2011
• American Express: Starting Up in a Recession — Right Product, Right Price, Outstanding Service, Knowledge @ Wharton 12/23/2010
• Can Regulations Create More Financially Savvy Consumers?, Knowledge @ Wharton 10/27/2010
• In Search of Capital: The Outlook for Startups in 2010, Knowledge @ Wharton 09/29/2010
• Israel’s PicScout: Where Risktaking and Entrepreneurial Drive Are Part of the DNA, Knowledge @ Wharton 09/16/2010
• Surviving Silly Bandz: Prolonging the Shelf Life of Fads, Knowledge @ Wharton 07/21/2010
• Can Twitter Promote Itself into Profitability?, Knowledge @ Wharton 05/26/2010
• Geography Lesson: Why Internet Retailers Should Pay Attention to Where Potential Customers Live, Knowledge @ Wharton 03/17/2010
• Netflix: One Eye on the Present and Another on the Future, Knowledge @ Wharton 10/28/2009
• The Shopper of Tomorrow: Trading Down, Knowledge @ Wharton 02/18/2009
• When the Going Gets Tough, the Tough Don’t Skimp on Their Ad Budgets, Knowledge @ Wharton 11/26/2008
• A Precarious Road: How Retailers Can Navigate Inflation’s Hazards, Knowledge @ Wharton 08/06/2008
• The Hard Sell: How to Market Products That Are No Longer Popular, Knowledge @ Wharton 04/30/2008
• ‘If Brands Are Built Over Years, Why Are They Managed Over Quarters?’, Knowledge @ Wharton 08/22/2007
• Robbing the Cradle? If Marketers Get Their Way, That Bundle of Joy Can Cost a Bundle, Knowledge @ Wharton 07/25/2007
• Making the Most of Every Marketing Dollar, Knowledge @ Wharton 07/11/2007
• New Products (Like the iPhone): Announce Early or Go for the Surprise Rollout?, Knowledge @ Wharton 06/13/2007
• Chief Receptionist Officer? Title Inflation Hits the CSuite, Knowledge @ Wharton 05/30/2007
• Online Companies Want a Piece of Oldstyle Media Business, Knowledge @ Wharton 11/29/2006
• What’s Next for Netflix?, Knowledge @ Wharton 11/01/2006
• MySpace, Facebook and Other Social Networking Sites: Hot Today, Gone Tomorrow?, Knowledge @ Wharton 05/03/2006
• Talking Chimps, Subservient Chickens And Others Blend Entertainment and Advertising, Knowledge @ Wharton 04/05/2006
• Pricing and Positioning for Entrepreneurial Marketers, Knowledge @ Wharton 03/30/2005
• The $2.4 Million Question: What is the ROI for Super Bowl Ads?, Knowledge @ Wharton 02/23/2005
• Silicon Valley’s Resurgence: Is It for Real?, Knowledge @ Wharton 02/11/2004
• The Super Bowl’s Superexpensive Advertising: Does It Work?, Knowledge @ Wharton 01/15/2003
• Of Mice and Men: How An Entrepreneurial Tale Became a Book, Knowledge @ Wharton 02/27/2002
• Making the Case for Outside Sales Reps, Knowledge @ Wharton 01/30/2002
• Corporate Sponsorships of Stadiums and Other Institutions Don’t Always Pay Off, Knowledge @ Wharton 05/09/2001
• How Good, or Bad, Marketing Decisions Can Make, or Break, a Company, Knowledge @ Wharton 05/09/2001
• Technology is Changing the Advertising Business, Knowledge @ Wharton 01/31/2001
• New Strategies for Success, Knowledge @ Wharton 09/17/1999
• How and When Advertising Works, Knowledge @ Wharton 03/27/1999