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Stephen A. Greyser, DBA

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Stephen A. Greyser is Richard P. Chapman Professor (Marketing/Communications) Emeritus, Harvard Business School, where he specializes in brand marketing, advertising, corporate communications, the business of sports, and nonprofit management. A graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Business School (MBA and DBA), he has been active in research and teaching at HBS since 1958. He was also an editor at the Harvard Business Review and later its Editorial Board Secretary and Board Chairman. He is responsible for 16 books, several co-edited special issue journals, numerous articles, and over 300 published HBS case studies; recent publications are Revealing the Corporation with John Balmer (on identity, reputation, corporate branding, etc.) and co-authored articles on “Monarchies as Corporate Brands,” heritage brands (a concept he co-created), “Aligning Identity and Strategy,” and BP and ethical corporate marketing (2011). He wrote the award-winning “Corporate Brand Reputation and Brand Crisis Management” in his co-edited “Corporate Marketing and Identity,” a special 2009 issue of Management Decision.
He developed the HBS Corporate Communications elective, creating over 40 cases and articles on issues management, corporate sponsorship, relations among business-media-publics, etc. His views on corporate advertising were the subject of full-page ads in The Wall Street Journal’s 1996-7 advertising campaign and he spoke on corporate reputation at the House or Lords.

He created and teaches Harvard’s Business of Sports course, he served on the Selection Committee for the Boston Red Sox Hall of Fame, and has authored numerous Business of Sports cases and articles. The latter include “Winners and Losers in the Olympics” (2006) and several on sponsorship, most recently a case on Bank of America’s Sports Sponsorship. He has organized seminars on Fifty Years of Change in intercollegiate Athletics, the Business of the Olympics, and the Branding of China via Sports. His comments on the meaning of the Olympics for China were seen by millions in China on CCTV after the 2008 Opening Ceremonies. He received the American Marketing Association’s 2010 Sports Marketing lifetime achievement award for American Marketing Association’s 2010 Sports Marketing lifetime achievement award for “distinguished career contributions to the scientific understanding of sports business.

He is past executive director of the Marketing Science Institute and the charter member of its Hall of Fame, and past president and an elected Fellow of the American Academy of Advertising for career contributions to the field. He received the Institute for Public Relations 2009 special award for “lifetime contributions to public relations education and research.” He twice was a public member of the National Advertising Review Boards for U.S. advertising self-regulation. He has served on numerous corporate and nonprofit boards. He was the first academic trustee of the Advertising Research Foundation and the Advertising Educational Foundation. He is a past national vice chairman of PBS and an overseer at the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston) and WGBH. He served as Alumni Association president of Boston Latin School, America’s oldest school (1635), conducted its 350th and 375th Founder’s Day ceremonies, and received its Distinguished Graduate Award (2005); previous honorees include Leonard Bernstein, Summer Redstone, and Theodore White.

Known as “the Cal Ripken of HBS,” in over forty years of teaching he has never missed a class.