Pioneering Digital Marketing and Strategic Initiatives at Smith

Thirty years ago, P.K. Kannan came to the University of Maryland Business School to teach in the marketing department. Since that time, the school has become the Robert H. Smith School of Business, and he has helped transform it into a powerhouse that trains students to become future business leaders.

The Dean’s Chair in Marketing Science has blazed a trail in the field of digital marketing research, but says gaining traction was tough in the beginning. “In 1995, when I started working in this area, I couldn’t really achieve much success because people said it was too futuristic.” Digital marketing – the promotion of products, brands or services using the internet – was in its infancy then. But over time, he has published research that has been key to the advancement of this marketing method.

Kannan has garnered numerous coveted awards. Among them is the AMA TechSIG Award, the American Marketing Association’s Innovation, Technology and Interactivity Special Interest Group Lifetime Achievement Award. It’s recognition for lifetime contributions to work at the intersection of tech and marketing. Kannan has been named a fellow of the INFORMS Society for Marketing Science, joining an esteemed group of about 40 scholars around the globe. He’s one of 21 Smith researchers named among the top 2% in the world, has earned the INFORMS John D.C. Little Award for the Best Paper and the ISMS Practice Prize. The AMA/MSI Paul Root Award has been awarded to Kannan twice, one of them for research he conducted with Smith colleague, Distinguished University Professor Michel Wedel.

Collaborating with colleagues at the Smith School and at other universities is a hallmark of Kannan’s work. He also works with former students who have gone on to become professors at other colleges. “We get excited about certain problems and just start working to solve them,” he says. And he sees the culmination of all of his awards as a reflection of the importance of the problems on which he chooses to work. “Many of my projects are developed from burning problems that companies have. We come up with creative solutions using marketing science.” The professor’s contributions to marketing are rooted in his focus on addressing the real-life problems of actual companies and making a tangible difference for those companies.

Over the years, Kannan's published work has spanned several areas, including premium pricing, how technology changes marketing strategy, and how social media tagging is related to a firm’s value. He’s worked with top corporate partners, Stanley Black & Decker, Marriott and Adobe, among them. And the goal has remained the same with all of his projects, solving corporate problems while at the same time creating cutting-edge research.

His enormous impact at Smith continues through the groundbreaking programs he helped create during his tenure as Associate Dean of Strategic Initiatives. Kannan served in the position for four years, starting in 2021. “We wanted to have an honors program for our undergrads. The Dean wanted me to set up a committee to examine the possibility, so we put together a committee to look at how it would be designed.” That honors program, the brainchild of Smith School Dean Prabhudev Konana, became the Interdisciplinary Business Honors (IBH) program, designed for exceptional students from all majors across the University of Maryland.

Kannan brought other groundbreaking initiatives of the Dean’s to life as well. Smith Business Leadership Fellows (SBLF) was ushered in during his time as head of strategic initiatives and was an offshoot of the IBH program. SBLF is a flagship program for freshmen and sophomores that promotes mentorship and community-building at the business school. Smith’s Office of Executive Education began offering self-paced online courses under Kannan’s oversight. “The market for executive education was a challenge then, and remains so, but it is in good hands, and I expect it to blossom soon,” he says. The Office of Experiential Learning was also set up, while a restructuring occurred in Smith’s Office of Digital Learning. “If it was strategic in nature, I got involved. Some of it was planned, and in other instances, a solution was found where there was a need for one.”

Whether it’s research or administrative, P.K. Kannan is a dynamo of business education, and a powerful constant runs through the success he’s had—finding solutions to real problems to make phenomenal changes in people’s lives.