Stephen A. Greyser

Stephen A. Greyser is Richard P. Chapman Professor (Marketing/Communications) Emeritus, of the Harvard Business School, specializes in brand marketing, advertising, corporate communications, the business of sports, and nonprofit management.  A graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Business School, he has been active in research and teaching at HBS since 1958.  He was also an editor at the Harvard Business Review and later its Editorial Board Secretary and Board Chairman.  He is responsible for 16 books, numerous journal articles, several special editions of journals, and over 300 published HBS case studies. Recent publications are Revealing the Corporation with John Balmer (on identity, reputation, corporate branding, etc.) and co-authored articles on “Monarchies as Corporate Brands,” Heritage Brands (a concept he co-created), “Aligning Identity and Strategy” (CMR lead article 2009), a 2011 Journal of Business Ethics article on ethical corporate marketing and BP, “Building and Maintaining Reputation Through Communications”, and a book chapter on “Corporate Communication and the Corporate Persona” (2013).  He wrote the award-winning “Corporate Brand Reputation and Brand Crisis Management” in his co-edited “Corporate Marketing and Identity,” a special 2009 issue of Management Decision.  He is co-author of a book on arts administration and editor of one on cultural policy.  At HBS, he developed the Corporate Communications elective, creating over 40 cases and articles on issues management, corporate sponsorship, relations among business-media-publics, etc.  His current research (co-authored) and most recent (2015) article is on the branding and identity of The Nobel Prize.

He created and teaches Harvard’s Business of Sports course, is a member of the University’s Faculty Standing Committee on Athletics, has served on the Selection Committee for the Boston Red Sox Hall of Fame, is on the board of The Sports Museum, and has authored numerous Business of Sports cases and articles.  The latter include “Winners and Losers in the Olympics” (2006) and several on sponsorship, most recently (2012) on Sponsorship-Linked Internal Marketing (co-author), and an HBS case on Bank of America’s Sports Sponsorship. He also published HBS faculty commentaries on the Sochi Olympics. Two HBS working papers (2013) examined NBC and the 2012 London Olympics and how MLB clubs have commercialized their Japanese top stars. He has organized seminars on Fifty Years of Change in Intercollegiate Athletics, the Business of the Olympics, Sports in China, and “Fenway Park Comes to HBS,” on the business of Fenway Park for its 2012 Centennial.  His comments on the meaning of the Olympics for China were seen by tens of millions in China on CCTV after the 2008 Opening Ceremonies.  At Doha GOALS 2012 he moderated a private conference session of global sports leaders (including Lord Coe) on improving the Olympics. He has recently written an analysis of  “Nation-Branding via Big Sports.” He received the American Marketing Association’s 2010 Sports Marketing lifetime achievement award for “distinguished career contributions to the scientific understanding of sports business.”

He is past executive director of the Marketing Science Institute and the charter member of its Hall of Fame, and also an elected Fellow of the American Academy of Advertising for career contributions to the field.  He received the Institute for Public Relations 2009 special award for “lifetime contributions to public relations education and research,” and Lipscomb University’s 2011 MediaMasters award for a “body of [communications] work that stands as a model and inspiration for the next generation.” He was recognized by IE University (Spain) for his pioneering work in corporate communication. He twice was a public member of the National Advertising Review Board for U.S. advertising self-regulation.  He has served on numerous corporate and nonprofit boards.    He is a trustee of the Arthur W. Page Society, and he was the first academic trustee of the Advertising Research Foundation and of the Advertising Educational Foundation. He is a past national vice chairman of PBS and an overseer at WGBH and at the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston), where he was the founding chair of its Trustees Marketing Committee.  He served as Alumni Association president of Boston Latin School, America’s oldest school (1635), and conducted its 350^th and 375^th Founder’s Day ceremonies as magister eventuum; he received its 2005 Distinguished Graduate Award.  He is an Honorary Fellow (2012) of Brunel University, where he has been a Visiting Professor and a member of its Business School’s Advisory Board.

Known as "the Cal Ripken of HBS," in over 45 years of teaching at Harvard he has never missed a class.