James Anderson

James C. Anderson is the William L. Ford Professor Emeritus of Marketing and Wholesale Distribution at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University.  Professor Anderson joined the faculty of the Kellogg School in 1984 as an assistant professor of marketing.  In 1987, he was named the first to hold the Kellogg School’s newly-endowed William L. Ford Distinguished Chair in Marketing and Wholesale Distribution. He retired from Northwestern University in August 2019. 

 Professor Anderson taught the graduate-level course in business marketing.  He was the program director of the Business Marketing Strategy executive program for over 20 years and taught in a number of executive development programs at the Kellogg School.  He has consulted and provided seminars for a number of companies in North America, South America, Europe, Asia, and Australia, such as American Express, bioMérieux, ExxonMobil, GE, Holcim, International Paper, C.P. Kelco, Orkla, PPG Industries, and Tetra Pak.  He is Principal of James C. Anderson LLC, an international management consulting firm focusing on implementing customer value management at client firms.

 Professor Anderson’s research interests are in constructing persuasive value propositions in business markets, and measurement approaches for demonstrating and documenting the value of market offerings.  He has written more than 50 journal articles, including six published in Harvard Business Review.  His management practice book, Value Merchants: Demonstrating and Documenting Superior Value in Business Markets, was published by Harvard Business School Press.  He also has co-authored the book, Business Market Management: Understanding, Creating and Delivering Value, which was published in its third edition by Pearson Prentice Hall.  He served as a member of the editorial boards of the Journal of Applied Psychology, the Journal of Marketing Research, the Journal of Business-to-Business Marketing and the Journal of Strategic Marketing.  He is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association.

 Professor Anderson was the Irwin Gross Distinguished ISBM Research Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Business Markets.  He has been a visiting research professor at the School of Business, Public Administration, and Technology, University of Twente, The Netherlands;  Eindhoven University of Technology, the Netherlands; and Uppsala University and Stockholm School of Economics, Sweden. He also has been vice president of the business marketing division of the American Marketing Association (AMA) and a member of the board of directors of the AMA.

 Professor Anderson came to Kellogg after three years as a member of the marketing faculty of the University of Texas at Austin.  Prior to that, from 1978 to 1981, he worked as a senior research psychologist in the corporate marketing research division of E.I. duPont de Nemours and Company, Inc.  He earned his Ph.D. in Psychology from Michigan State University in 1978.