Willem Smit

Prof. Willem Smit is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at the Asia School of Business and an International Faculty Fellow at MIT Sloan. His main expertise lies in strategy making and managerial cognition, particularly in the areas of digital marketing, global branding and new venture marketing. Prof. Smit earned his doctorate in Marketing from the Erasmus University in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Prior to joining ASB, he was at IMD in Lausanne, SMU and NUS in Singapore, where he designed and delivered MBA and executive development programs for multinational companies in the telecom, pharmaceutical and consumer-packaged goods industries.

Willem Smit, PhD is an international and multi-disciplinary marketing and entrepreneurship scholar, whose research focuses on Strategy Making and Managerial Cognition.

In particular, the newly revolutionized and digitized decision environments for marketers fascinate him. Connected to the academic field of managerial cognition, his scholarly work has been around the theme of “Marketing Strategy Heuristics in search of Superior Performance” over the past several years.

Interestingly, there is still little consensus on how to devise a strategy for discovering, creating and maintaining a sustainable — at least temporary — competitive advantage for brands and firms. This ties in with one of the biggest and longest debates as to whether heuristics/biases are good/productive or bad/unproductive: while some scholars would argue that “strategic leaders’ superior ability to manage the mental process necessary to pursue cognitively distant opportunities;” others consider local search and opportunities “nearby” much more obvious and more directly linked to performance. Organized in three streams of research, he has studies using a variety of methodologies: surveys, experiments, and archival data analysis, where he focuses on:

• Exploration heuristics: are opportunities far-away more attractive?
• Experimentation heuristics: are opportunities nearby more creational?
• Decision-Maker herself: are opportunities “nearby” or “faraway” preferred?

Prior to moving to South East Asia in 2011, Willem earned his PhD from the RSM Erasmus University in 2006. He joined IMD as a research fellow and began lecturing at the Université de Lausanne. He held teaching positions at various schools in the region, among others: Singapore Management University, an MIT affiliate Malaysia Institute for Supply Chain Innovation, Taylor’s University, and Hult Shanghai. In his 7+ years in Asia, Willem has built a 700+ member community of junior brand managers, called So-You-Think-You-Can-Brand. To monitor the ASEAN region’s economic integration at a consumer-level, he launched the ALL-ASEAN brands (allaseanbrands.com) last year.

Willem has published his studies in the Harvard Business Review, Journal of Business Venturing, and the Financial Times among others. His work has also received media attention in publications, such as Times, Bloomberg and Newsweek.

Besides traditional print publications, Willem experiments with disseminating his research findings through new social media. His video clip series, “Which Chinese/South African/Singapore/Indian brands are Best for the World,” on brands from emerging economies can be found and viewed on YouTube.

He has designed and delivered executive development programs for multinational companies in the telecom, pharmaceutical and consumer-packaged goods industries. Most recently, his All-ASEAN Digital course (www.allaseandigital.com) is an MBA-ExecEd hybrid where companies join students in the classroom to fix their Digital Marketing strategies. The typical setting of Action Learning is inverted: “Action Learning Outside-In” so to speak.

As a co-owner of a 5th generation family business, he advises the top management team and supervisory board on strategy and marketing.