Marketing Around the World: Ignacio Luri ‘20 PhD (Marketing)

Ever since his marketing work for a local grocery store in Spain, Ignacio Luri ’20 PhD (Marketing) has been curious about the field of marketing. What is it, he wondered, and why is it important? He was fascinated that marketing can be used both to promote a product or service and also generate brand awareness for a business and its mission and vision.

These questions eventually helped Luri develop big aspirations. Due to the small job market in the Canary Islands, Luri and his girlfriend decided to leave with hopes of experiencing a new language and culture. When his girlfriend received an opportunity at The University of Arizona with the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, Luri saw this as an opportunity to further his education and learn more about policy and health promotion, which led him to apply to the School of Government and Public Policy.

While at Arizona, he met the late Sidney Levy and the late Bob Lusch, two faculty members Luri found himself idolizing. Levy was a professor in marketing, eventually becoming the head of the marketing department at Eller in 1997. In 2004, Lusch became the head of Eller’s marketing department and also served as the executive director of the McGuire Center for Entrepreneurship. Lusch invited Luri to come to Eller as a visiting scholar and to work on research in the marketing department, where he introduced Luri to the newly-launched Master of Science in Marketing program.

“They were both big influences on my experience in Eller,” Luri says. “They were the push that told me that being an academic is about thinking—how I think and what I apply it to is up to me. They helped me see that, in the end, marketing is everything--it can be everything. Consumer behavior is analogous to human behavior.” After being introduced to the program, Luri decided to apply.

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Entering the very first cohort of the MS in Marketing program at Eller, Luri saw how marketing can be applied to many of the things he wanted to do—such as policy and promoting wellness. In one of his market research classes, he took part in a consulting project that involved conducting market research for Lovin’ Spoonfuls, a Tucson-based vegan restaurant. That experience left him with an important lesson—the main point of the business wasn’t to sell, but to promote the lifestyle of being vegan. The owner wanted to educate people about the moral arguments for not eating meat.

Knowing that academia was what he wanted to pursue, it only felt right for Luri to apply for the PhD program in the same department.

“It was a very natural transition from the master’s to the PhD program in the marketing department,” he says. “The faculty in the program were very encouraging and excited to have me and I couldn’t thank them enough.”

He entered the PhD program in 2015 during the fall semester and since then he has been doing research on financial wellbeing, financial health and literacy in the nonprofit sector, while being a mediator between credit unions and consumers. He has also done consulting for nonprofits as a part of his research and taught consumer behavior classes.

“Eller has impacted my career and my perspective on the idea of marketing. It has also introduced me to different individuals and projects that helped me realize what I really wanted to pursue in the field of marketing,” he says.

This experience has prepared Luri for his future as an assistant professor in marketing at DePaul University, where he will be teaching and conducting research in fall 2020. Through the digital marketing certificate offered at DePaul, he will have the opportunity to work with digital consumer behavior, online consumer behavior and analyze social media conversations.