—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.
Education: Doctor of Business Administration – Marketing, Harvard Business School, USA, 2015; Master of Business Administration, IESE, Spain, 2008; Bachelor of Science – Economics, LUISS University, Italy, 2003
Since Silvia teaches as a business school, I'll address a leadership aspect of our interaction. I skimped on a leadership step, so we did an episode 1.5, which is my lingo for redoing episode 1 when the person wasn't able to fulfill his or her commitment. That's my responsibility as leader of the interaction. Silvia and I had a wonderful first conversation that led to a commitment that sounded like she'd enjoy it and doable, but in the end wasn't quite. Even if a quick hike north of the city would be enjoyable, catching a Metro-North train from Columbia University isn't that convenient and her schedule may not have bee as flexible as she suspected in our first conversation. For those listening to these conversations to learn the Spodek Method, in our first conversation I didn't check with her how practical the commitment was given her constraints. As the leader of the interaction, I should have asked ahead to imagine her schedule, the logistics of catching the train, and so on. The key measure the first time someone acts on their intrinsic motivation isn't how big it is. It's if they person does it. When someone acts on intrinsic motivation, they'll find it rewarding. If they feel reward, they'll want to do it again and the next time will be bigger, especially if they've always considered acting on sustainability a sacrifice or something that has to be big or any of the other myths people propagate. Sadly, even ardent environmentalists lead people to think of acting more sustainably as something they won't like or won't find rewarding when they use tactics like trying to convince, cajole, coerce, or seek compliance. In this double episode we hear how she did something more practical. At the end, note that she's open to doing more.
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.