Valarie Zeithaml

 Valarie Zeithaml

David S. Van Pelt Family Distinguished Professor of Marketing

Dr. Zeithaml, the David S. Van Pelt Family Distinguished Professor of Marketing and an award-winning teacher and researcher, is an internationally recognized pioneer of services marketing. She devoted the last 35 years to researching, consulting and teaching service quality, services management and customer equity.

She has researched customer expectations in more than 50 industries. She has consulted with service and product companies, including IBM, Kaiser Permanente, GE, John Hancock Financial Services, Aetna, AT&T, Metropolitan Life Insurance, Bank of America, Chase Manhattan Bank, Allstate, and Procter and Gamble.

Dr. Zeithaml was won the 2009 AMA Irwin/McGraw-Hill Distinguished Marketing Educator Award for lifetime leadership in marketing education and extensive contributions to the marketing.  In 2008, she was awarded the Paul D. Converse Award from the American Marketing Association.  The Converse Award is granted every four years to individuals who have made outstanding and enduring contributions to marketing through journal articles, books or a body of work.  In 2004, Professor Zeithaml received both the Innovative Contributor to Marketing Award given by the Marketing Management Association and the Outstanding Marketing Educator Award given by the Academy of Marketing Science. In 2001, she received the American Marketing Association’s Career Contributions to the Services Discipline Award.    

Dr. Zeithaml is the author or co-author of seven books.  She and her co-authors won the prestigious inaugural Berry-American Marketing Association Book Prize for their book, Driving Customer Equity: How Customer Lifetime Value is Reshaping Corporate Strategy. She is the first author of the best-selling business book, Delivering Quality Service: Balancing Customer Perceptions and Expectations, which won the Choice Book Award and is now in its 20^th printing.  She is also the first author of the Irwin/McGraw-Hill textbook, Services Marketing, now in its 6^th edition.

She is the former associate dean of the MBA Program, former Senior Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and former Area Chair of Marketing at UNC’s Kenan-Flagler Business School.

She received her PhD and MBA from the University of Maryland.