“I love being exposed to and creating new ideas, spending time with my students,” says Beth Ghiloni-Wage ’80.
“Outside of work, my husband and I have hosted high school exchange students for the past few years. Next year we have a boy from Italy and a girl from Denmark. We love learning about new cultures.”
Academia to Corporate and dot.com
Beth Ghiloni-Wage ’80 (Sociology) started life after earning her Ph.D. (University of California at Santa Cruz) as tenure-track sociology faculty in the mid-’80s, then just a few years later switched gears to do market research in the private sector.
She quickly landed in Strategic and Tactical Small Business Marketing/Market Research with Pitney Bowes and was promoted to Director of New Channels and SMB Marketing.
She left Pitney Bowes in time to experience the highs and lows of the “dot com” bubble and crash – with a success story to tell, then returned as Director of Pitney Bowes Financial Services. She then spent nearly eight years as Executive Director of Pitney Bowes, during which she achieved gains in an economic environment of declining industry, declining core business revenue stream, and within a highly traditional corporate culture.
Beth has developed marketing partnerships with Internet giants like eBay and Amazon, traditional companies like Hallmark and the USPS, and Silicon Valley startups; spearheaded new product development efforts in the software as a service (SaaS) arena; and has been at the forefront of the development and rollout of new digital marketing channels.
Back to Academia
Her many years of experience earned her expertise in using and introducing a mix of new products in a variety of marketing positioned her well for a return to academia, this time in marketing. She is an Associate Professor in the Marketing Department at Central Connecticut State University after nearly four years as a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Hartford.
Her teaching specialties are marketing research and analytics, new marketing technologies/channels, strategy, new product development, branding and consumer behavior, startup/IPO marketing, partnership marketing, internet services marketing and network analysis.
With 25 years of corporate industry experience, she is known as a corporate entrepreneur with a proven track record for generating results quickly and under budget.
Her current academic research agenda focuses on how millennial consumers interpret, interact and react to text messages they receive from businesses as a basis for deepening our understanding of customer experience and engagement.
She is also marketing consultant for 3Seventy, “the preferred mobile solution for developers and marketers to connect with their customers via the text message inbox.”
Value of Sociology to Business
“My background in sociology was critical to my success in corporate America.
“Sociological Theory taught me different ways of viewing and acting in the world. Methods taught me how to systematically understand what was really going on “out there.”
“Theory and method helped me to frame corporate and customer problems and solutions in innovative ways.”
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