Education

  • PhD Marketing, Columbia University
  • Doctoral Program in Marketing, MIT
  • SM Operations Research, MIT
  • MSc Applied Mathematics, University of Karachi
  • BSc (Honors) Mathematics, University of Karachi

Selected Publications

  • Fareena Sultan and Syagnik (Sy) Banerjee, “Enhancing Customer Insights with Public Location Data,” Harvard Business Review, online, https://hbr.org/2018/06/enhancing-customer-insights-with-public-location-data, June 12, 2018.
  • Hofacker, C., Malthouse, E., and Sultan, F., “Big Data and consumer behavior: imminent opportunities”, Journal of Consumer Marketing, Vol. 33 Issue 2 pp 89-97.
  • Urban, G. and Sultan, F., “The Case for ‘Benevolent' Mobile Apps,” Sloan Management Review, Winter 2015, pp 31-37, (http://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/the-case-for-benevolent-mobile-apps/).
  • Tao, T., Rohm, A., Sultan, F., and Pagani, M., “Consumers Un-Tethered: A Three-Market Empirical Study of Consumers' Mobile Marketing Acceptance,” Journal of Business Research, 66, June 2013, pp 2536-2544.
  • Rohm, A.J., Gao, T., Sultan, F., and Pagani, M., “Brand in the Hand: A Cross-Market Investigation of Consumer Acceptance of Mobile Marketing,” Business Horizons, 55 (5), 485-493. Received an Honorable Mention in the Best Article Category for Business Horizons 2012.
  • Gao, T., Sultan, F., Rohm, A., and Huang, S., “Antecedents of Consumer Attitudes Toward Mobile Marketing: A Comparative Study of Youth Markets in the United States and China,” Thunderbird International Business Review, Vol. 54, No. 2 March/April 2012, pp 212-223.

Selected Presentations

  • “Social Media Geoforensics: Leveraging Location-Based Data for Marketing Insights,” with Syagnik (Sy) Banerjee, presented at Marketing EDGE conference Oct 2017
  • “Social Media Geoforensics: An Exploratory Analysis,” co-authored with Sy Banerjee, EMAC 2016, Oslo, Norway. May 2016.
  • Hofacker, C., Sultan, F., and Malthouse, E., “Big Data and Consumer Behavior: The Imminent Opportunity,” Direct Marketing Association Marketing EDGE conference, October 2015.
  • Sultan, F., Hofacker, C., and Malthouse, E., “Big Data and Consumer Behavior: The Imminent Cultural Clash,” EMAC conference, Leuven, Belgium, May 2015.
  • Sultan, F., Gao, T., Rohm, A., and Pagani, M., “A Cross-Market Comparison of Youth Consumers' Mobile Marketing Acceptance,” Marketing EDGE Research Summit, San Diego, October 2014.
  • Sultan, F., Gao, T., Rohm, A., and Pagani, M., “A Three-Market Study of Consumer Acceptance of Mobile Marketing,” Conference Presentation, Marketing EDGE Research Summit, Chicago, October 2013.
  • Sultan, F., Gao, T., Rohm, A. and Wang, J., “A Value and Risk Model of Consumers' Mobile Marketing Acceptance,” DMEF Marketing Research Summit, Las Vegas, October 2012.

Research & Teaching Interests

Sultan's research interests are in Marketing Innovations and Digital Marketing. Her current interests include Location-based Social Media Geo-forensics, Global Mobile Marketing, Digital Marketing, Social Media, New Technologies, Big Data and Marketing Analytics. Sultan has published extensively in the Journal of Marketing ResearchJournal of MarketingSloan Management Review, Harvard Business Review (online), Journal of RetailingJournal of Business Research, Marketing Management, Journal of Interactive Marketing, and Marketing Letters among others. Sultan has published recent papers on the concept of Mobile Marketing, “Benevolent” mobile apps, and Big Data and Consumer Behavior implications. Dr. Sultan has written cases on Mobile Marketing working with Adidas in Netherlands. While at Harvard, Professor Sultan wrote HBS cases studies on IBM and Zenith. At Northeastern, she has written cases on Adidas and Pokémon GO among others.

Industry & Academic Experience

Dr. Fareena Sultan is a Professor of Marketing at the D-Amore-McKim School of Business (DMSB), Northeastern University, Boston where she has been a faculty member since 1995. She was the Robert Morrison Fellow and the MBA Marketing Career Track Chair at Northeastern from 2006 to 2011. Dr. Sultan's Ph.D. in Marketing is from Columbia University. She has a Master's degree in Operations Research from MIT and a Master's degree in Applied Mathematics from the University of Karachi, Pakistan. Sultan teaches Marketing Management, Digital/Mobile Marketing at Northeastern.

Prior to Northeastern, Dr. Sultan was an Assistant Professor of Marketing at the Harvard Business School for six years, a Visiting Associate Professor at UC Berkeley and an Associate Professor at Golden Gate University. She has been a Visiting Scholar at Columbia University and at the Center for E-Business, Sloan School, MIT. She has also been a Senior Research Associate at the Marketing Science Institute.

Services to the Profession

Dr. Sultan has done research, consulting and executive education in a variety of global settings and has presented her research in numerous academic/industry conferences and worked on projects with companies such as BT, Intel, Adidas, Reebok, General Motors, McCann-Erickson, IBM and Zenith among others.

Awards & Recognition

Dr. Sultan has won several awards during her career.In 2017, Sultan's paper on “Big Data and Consumer Behavior: Imminent Opportunities,” published in 2016, was chosen as the Outstanding Paper winner in the Journal of Consumer Marketing 2017 Literati Awards. Dr. Sultan was designated a “Top Scholar” by Bocconi University, Italy in 2011 for her Mobile Marketing research. In 2009, she was a finalist for the Mobile Marketing Academic of the Year award from the Mobile Marketing Association. In 2006, she received the Robert Morrison Fellowship from Northeastern. Her “Brand in the Hand,” case on Mobile Marketing received top-10 best-selling case awards from Ivey Case publishing for 3 years in a rowin 2007, 2008 and 2009. For her research, Dr. Sultan received the prestigious 1995 O' Dell research award from the American Marketing Association. For her teaching, Dr. Sultan received the Earl F. Cheit Teaching Excellence Award in 1993 at UC Berkeley

In 2018, she was invited to be a research scholar at the AI research center at EM Lyon Business School, France. In 2016, she was an invited keynote speaker at a marketing conference in Malaysia on the topic of “Mobile Marketing: Implications for the Bottom of the Pyramid.” She was an invited keynote speaker on “Digital Trends Panel” at the DMA 2015 Marketing EDGE conference and discussed Big Data and the Internet of Things (IoT). Sultan co-chaired the DMA Marketing EDGE conference in October 2014. She also presented her research and chaired two panels, one on Big Data and Marketing Analytics, and the other on Mobile Marketing. In 2013, Sultan was awarded a research grant by DMSB to pursue her research on Mobile Marketing. In 2012, Dr. Sultan was an invited speaker at the Wharton Mobile Analytics conference to present her work on Mobile Marketing. In 2011, Sultan was the invited key note speaker at the(DMA) Marketing EDGE conference where she presented her research on Mobile Marketing. In 2008, Dr. Sultan chaired the first ever conference on Mobile Marketing sponsored by the Marketing Science Institute.