Tellis, Gerard J. 1950-

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TELLIS, Gerard J. 1950-

PERSONAL:

Born March 27, 1950, in Bombay, India; immigrated to United States, 1979; son of Aloysius Louis and Lucy Tellis; married Cheryl Anne Evelyn, March 5, 1980; children: Neil, Viren, Kethan, Sonia. Education: University of Bombay (India), B.S. (chemistry), 1975; Xavier Institute of Management (Jamshedpur, India), PGDBM, 1977; University of Michigan, Ph.D., 1983.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089-1421. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Johnson & Johnson, Bombay, India, sales development manager, 1977-79; University of Iowa, Iowa City, associate professor of marketing, 1983-88; University of Southern California, Los Angeles, professor, 1989-95, Neely Professor of Marketing, 1996—.

MEMBER:

American Academy of Advertising, American Marketing Association, Association for Consumer Research, Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences, American Youth Soccer Association, director of coaches, 1996-99, Hacienda Heights, CA tournament director, 1998-99.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Best Paper Award, American Marketing Association Summer Educators' Conference, 1982; Chester B. Phillips Award for Outstanding Teaching as a professor, 1988; Best Paper Award, Marketing Science Institute's Working Paper Series, 1993; Donny Award for best cover art in marketing science, 1996; William F. Odell Award for best paper, Journal of Marketing Research, 1998; Harold D. Maynard Award for most significant contribution to marketing thought, Journal of Marketing, 2000, 2002; best business book citation, Harvard Business Review, 2001, for Will and Vision; AMA-Berry Award for best book in marketing, 2003; Distinguished Alumnus Award, University of Michigan, 2003; winner of research competition on global marketing, Marketing Science Institute and International Journal of Research in Marketing, 2003.

WRITINGS:

Advertising and Sales Promotion Strategy, Addison-Wesley (Reading, MA), 1998.

(With Peter N. Golder) Will and Vision: How Latecomers Grow to Dominate Markets, McGraw-Hill (New York, NY), 2002.

Effective Advertising: Understanding When, How, and Why Advertising Works, Sage Publications (Thousand Oaks, CA), 2004.

Contributor to periodicals, including Journal of Marketing Research, Strategic Management Journal, Journal of Marketing, and Sloan Management Review.

WORK IN PROGRESS:

Cases in Advertising and Promotion, Sage Publications (Thousand Oaks, CA), forthcoming; research into innovation, market entry, new product growth, advertising, pricing, and promotion.

SIDELIGHTS:

Gerard J. Tellis was born in India, where he was also educated before immigrating to the United States and earning a Ph.D. at the University of Michigan. Tellis worked for Johnson & Johnson in sales and marketing in India, and from 1983 he taught marketing, first at the University of Iowa and then at the University of Southern California, where he was named Neely Professor of Marketing. Tellis contributes articles to a long list of business journals and has written books that include Will and Vision: How Latecomers Grow to Dominate the Market, which he coauthored with Peter N. Golder, associate professor of marketing at New York University.

Tellis and Golder provide an historical analysis of the evolution of various markets over ten years. What they conclude is that rushing to be first with an idea or product does not guarantee success. Instead, the principles that ensure market leadership include vision, persistence, innovation, commitment, and asset leverage. "The real causes of enduring market leadership are vision and will," they write. "Enduring market leaders have a revolutionary and inspiring vision of the mass market, and they exhibit an indomitable will to realize that vision."

The authors offer case studies in sixty-six industries of companies that have become dominant but were not first. These include Gillette, which entered the safety razor market decades after it began; Microsoft, which has never pioneered; and Amazon, not the first Internet bookseller, but now the largest. Other companies discussed include Hewlett-Packard, Federal Express, Procter & Gamble, Charles Schwab, Xerox, Intel, and Matsushita.