Meet Drucker’s Two AMA Marketing Legends: Bernard Jaworski and Deborah MacInnis

The American Marketing Association just named two Drucker School professors, Bernard Jaworski and Deborah MacInnis, legends of the field.

Companies today are very good at capturing our attention and far less good at earning our trust. Getting the second part right depends on something harder and older than any campaign: actually understanding how people think, feel, and decide. Few scholars have shaped that understanding more than Bernard Jaworski and Deborah MacInnis, and this summer the American Marketing Association named them both legends of the field.

What makes that more than a happy coincidence is that Jaworski and MacInnis go back a long way. Decades ago, working with Christine Moorman, they built one of consumer research’s most durable frameworks, a model of the motivation, opportunity, and ability that people bring to making sense of what a brand tells them. They helped shape the field partly by building on each other’s work, and both eventually landed in the same place: the Drucker School of Management in Claremont.

The recognition came this summer in Denver, where the AMA convened the scholars it considers the field’s legends, Jagdish Sheth, Valarie Zeithaml, Yoram Wind, Roland Rust, and Len Berry among them, for a session devoted to their careers. Two of the honorees hold appointments at the same small school.

Two Ideas, One Instinct

The two arrived at that shared instinct from opposite ends. Jaworski’s signature contribution, market orientation, starts with the company. Defined in a pair of early-1990s papers with Ajay Kohli, it reframed good marketing as the work of the whole organization, engineering, finance, operations, and the people who answer the phones all paying close attention to what customers actually need and organizing around it, rather than leaving “marketing” to a single department. Those papers have been cited more than 49,000 times.

MacInnis turned the same attention the other way, toward the customer. Her research helped explain how people actually process what a brand tells them, how emotions like hope and anxiety shape the choices they make, and why we come to admire and stay loyal to some brands and not others, the question at the heart of her book Brand Admiration. Where Jaworski asked how a company should organize around its customers, MacInnis asked what is happening inside the customer it is trying to understand.

Put those two questions together, and you get close to a whole picture, which is more or less what their MOA framework was. It is fitting that two scholars who spent their careers studying how to understand people ended up understood, by their own field, as among its most important.

Why the Ideas Belong at Drucker

If that instinct, to start with the human being, sounds familiar in Claremont, it should. Peter Drucker wrote that the purpose of a business is to create a customer, an idea he set down in The Practice of Management (1954), and he insisted that management is a human undertaking answerable to society, not a machine for producing returns. Jaworski holds the chair that carries Drucker’s name; MacInnis, a research professor at the school, spent a career giving empirical weight to the idea that customers are people first. Their work reads as two long arguments for the conviction Drucker started with.

“Bernie and Debbie are living proof of what we tell every incoming class: that good management begins with paying attention to people,” says David Sprott, dean of the Drucker School of Management. “Between them they helped shape how the field understands both companies and customers, and our students get to learn it from the people who did the work. Having scholars of their stature here, as teachers and colleagues, raises the level of everyone around them.”

The Idea’s Moment

Their point is easy to understand. The tools reshaping business (recommendation engines, automated outreach, the AI that answers a customer before a person does) make it easier than ever to optimize for the metric closest at hand and to mistake motion for understanding. The research both scholars built their careers on works as a discipline against that reflex: it insists that behind every click is a person with motives no dashboard can fully see.

“I’m flattered, but the honor matters less than the idea,” Jaworski says. “Marketing works when you actually understand your customer — what they’re really trying to get done, not just what gets them to click. The technology keeps getting better at grabbing attention. The companies that win are the ones that use it to earn trust.”

“It’s a lovely honor, and a little surreal to share it with Bernie after all these years,” MacInnis says. “The through-line of my work has always been simple: customers are people, not data points. They act on emotion as much as logic, and the companies that remember that are the ones people end up loving. That matters more now, not less.”

What It Adds Up To

Both bring more than a citation record. Jaworski has been voted MBA Teacher of the Year at both the Drucker School and the University of Southern California. He has also worked inside the kinds of companies he studies, spending roughly a decade as a senior partner at the consulting firm Monitor Group. MacInnis brings a decorated career in consumer research: she co-authored Brand Admiration and the widely used textbook Consumer Behavior with Wayne Hoyer and Rik Pieters. She served as co-editor of the Journal of Consumer Research. Between them, the school covers both halves of the field.

That is a large part of the argument for a Drucker education: a school small enough to feel personal, on a faculty that includes people who helped write the discipline. You can read about market orientation, or brand admiration, in a textbook, or you can study where the people who named them work.

Learn More

Understanding what a company should offer and understanding what a customer actually wants are two different disciplines, and this year the AMA recognized scholars who devoted their careers to each. That’s the thinking a Drucker education is built on: start with the person, not the pitch. Explore our MBA and specialized master’s programs or request information to get started.