Valarie Zeithaml

Valarie Zeithaml is an award-winning teacher and researcher, and an internationally recognized pioneer of services marketing. She devoted the last 35 years to researching, consulting and teaching service quality, services management and customer equity.

Dr. Zeithaml has researched customer expectations in more than 50 industries. She has consulted with service and product companies, including IBM, Kaiser Permanente, GE, John Hancock Financial Services, Aetna, AT&T, Metropolitan Life Insurance, Bank of America, Chase Manhattan Bank, Allstate, and Procter and Gamble.

For her work that is influencing the future direction of marketing, she was named a Thomson Reuters Highly Cited Researcher in the report on “The World’s Most Influential Scientific Minds.”

The American Marketing Association (AMA) named her a Marketing Legend in 2016. She was selected for its inaugural cohort of AMA Fellows for her significant contributions to the research, theory and practice of marketing and service to the AMA in 2015.

She won the 2009 AMA Irwin/McGraw-Hill Distinguished Marketing Educator Award for lifetime leadership in marketing education and extensive contributions to the marketing. In 2008, the AMA awarded her with the Paul D. Converse Award, which is granted every four years to individuals who have made outstanding and enduring contributions to marketing through journal articles, books or a body of work. She received the AMA’s Career Contributions to the Services Discipline Award in 2001.

She received both the Innovative Contributor to Marketing Award from the Marketing Management Association and the Outstanding Marketing Educator Award from the Academy of Marketing Science in 2004.

Dr. Zeithaml is the author or co-author of seven books. She and her co-authors won the prestigious inaugural Berry-American Marketing Association Book Prize for their book Driving Customer Equity: How Customer Lifetime Value is Reshaping Corporate Strategy. She is the first author of the best-selling business book Delivering Quality Service: Balancing Customer Perceptions and Expectations, which won the Choice Book Award and is now in its 20th printing. She is also the first author of the Irwin/McGraw-Hill textbook Services Marketing, now in its sixth edition.

She is the former associate dean of the MBA Program, former senior associate dean for academic affairs and former chair of the marketing area at UNC Kenan-Flagler.

She received her PhD and MBA from the University of Maryland, and her BA from Gettysburg College.

Areas of Expertise

• marketing
• marketing - services
• marketing - crm
• customer service
• customer relationship management