Kathleen Kennedy

Kathleen’s career in marketing, strategy, and consumer research successfully spans both the academic and business worlds. Kathleen is currently an Associate Professor of Practice in the Retailing and Consumer Science program at the University of Arizona and teaches retail and marketing strategy, innovation and entrepreneurship, digital retailing, and sustainable consumption courses.

In 2017, Kathleen focused her academic and research efforts on retailing and consumer buying behavior, with a focus on retail innovation, the integration of AI/ML (Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning) retail services in shopping and consumer decision-making, and how retail innovation can increase the efficiency of the marketplace advancing sustainable consumption. Her current research is on understanding the role and effect of intelligent, self-learning AI/ML systems in shopper-retailer relationships and the underlying consumer buying process.

Kathleen is the faculty adviser for the 2019 Global Retail Competition academic team and for the Retail Entrepreneurship Club (REC). She is actively engaged in developing applied learning course experiences and received an Experiential Design Learning Incubator grant (2019-2020) to develop and pilot a community-engaged learning course initiative, RCSC 150B1 Consumers, the Economy, and Sustainable Consumption, and a Norton School Strategic grant (2019-2021) supporting student development and operations of a fully-functioning E-Commerce store within RCSC digital retailing courses. Kathleen is committed to community education and professional development in data sciences and co-organized the 2019 WiDS (Women in Data Science) Tucson conference.

Prior to joining the University of Arizona, Kathleen was on the Marketing faculty at The University of Akron (2011-2017). She concurrently served as Executive Director of the Taylor Institute for Direct Marketing (2011-2012) and as Research Director of the Suarez Applied Marketing Research Laboratories (2011-2015) where she led a 5-year initiative to advance innovative marketing research methods, and to apply consumer neuroscience methods in brand response, user experience, and ad testing research. She also was Executive Director of the Center of Innovative Entrepreneurship (2005-2006).

Kathleen previously was a senior marketing and e-commerce executive at Office Depot, Federated Department Stores (Macy’s Inc.), and other major retailers. She was also Managing Partner and Director of the Customer Centre for Loyalty Excellence at OgilvyOne Worldwide. Kathleen co-founded four successful marketing services businesses including Mindnav LLC, a leading-edge marketing research company developing consumer research and customer experience applications that enable insights not possible through traditional market research methods.

Her publications include “Research in reverse: Ad testing using an inductive consumer neuroscience approach” in the Journal of Business Research and “Measuring consumer neural activation to differentiate cognitive processing of advertising: Revisiting Krugman” in the European Journal of Marketing.

Kathleen received a Masters of Business Administration from the University of Miami (FL) in 2004 and is currently a Postgraduate Research Candidate in the Doctor of Business Administration programme at The University of Manchester (UK), Alliance Manchester Business School. 

She lives and work in Tucson, Arizona, USA.