Jennifer Aaker

A social psychologist, Jennifer Aaker is the General Atlantic Professor of Marketing at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business. Her research focuses on the psychology of time, money and happiness — specifically how people choose to spend their time and money, and when and why those choices are associated with lasting value. She also empirically explores how small acts can create significant change, and how those effects can be fueled by digital and social media.  Noted for her early work on the dimensions of brand personality, Aaker’s current research is rooted in the psychology of choice and the shifting meaning of happiness. She is the recipient of the Distinguished Scientific Achievement Award from the Society for Consumer Psychology and the Stanford Distinguished Teaching Award. 

Aaker teaches courses at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business and Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (“d.school”) such as “Building Innovative Brands” (with Chris Flink, IDEO), The Innovation Playbook, Designing Story in a Digital World, and Rethinking Purpose. She co-authored the award-winning book “The Dragonfly Effect: Quick, Effective and Powerful Ways to Use Social Media to Drive Impact” with her husband (to whom she is surprisingly still happily married), and has served on the Advisory Board of early stage startups and companies, from ADAY to Google X.  

She counts winning a dance-off in the early 1980s, establishing a reputation as a bad cook, and helping to raise her three children, Cooper, Devon, and Tea Sloane, as her biggest accomplishments — though not necessarily in that order.