—Systemic change begins with personal change—
Silvia Bellezza is an Associate Professor of Business in Marketing at Columbia Business School. Her research focuses on status signaling in consumption. Specifically, her work examines traditional status signals (e.g., conventional luxury brands and products) and alternative status signals (e.g., minimalism, vintage, sustainable luxury). Professor Bellezza’s research has been published in top-tier academic journals, including the Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing Research, and Management Science. Her work has also received extensive media coverage in popular outlets, such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, and Scientific American.
Before joining Columbia, she earned her doctorate in marketing at Harvard Business School and worked in the marketing departments of L.V.M.H. and Dannon. Professor Bellezza currently teaches the Sustainable Marketing elective to MBA and Executive MBA students.
Silvia created the course Sustainable Marketing at Columbia. It's an elective and has become the class at the business school with the most students from other schools at the university. In looking for a guest speaker on sustainable consumerism, she found the New York Times profile on me. She decided to invite me before realizing I'd gotten my MBA where she teaches. Only when we spoke did she learn I focus beyond just living sustainably to creating a leadership program with a mission to change global culture. When I spoke to hear class, I spoke about changing culture, which in some ways conflicted with the marketing goal of selling more products. It also resonated with many of her students' interests in creating a more sustainable world. I got a lot of attention after class. We recorded this episode before I guest-spoke at another section of her course. We talk in this episode about how that class went from her perspective as well as differences between sustainability leadership and marketing. We did the first part of the Spodek Method. You can hear that as a business educator, she analyzed it, so we talked about that analysis.