Zsolt Katona, Professor & Digital Marketing Expert – At the Intersection of Marketing and Technology

Professor Zsolt Katona chats with host Nick Gerwe to share his journey to Haas, research initiatives, and plans for his core Marketing course for this year’s class of EWMBA’s. 

Zsolt is a Professor of Marketing at Haas and strives to introduce and excite each new crop of Weekend MBA students to the world that a Marketing perspective can open. With PhDs in Computer Science and Marketing, Zsolt is a born learner, self-described nerd, and expert in each aspect of Marketing and Business Analytics he dives into. He brings his research and expertise to the classroom to apply Marketing frameworks and analysis to a series of real-world cases, and instill the Marketing intuition necessary for any successful business leader. 

In explaining how he ended up at Haas, Zsolt praised the university’s openness to academic curiosity and “the freedom, the amount of flexibility that Haas offered and being able to do your research the way you want to, and being very independent and in how you operate as a professor. “

In advising incoming students on how to get the most out of his Marketing course, Zsolt explains, “If you are properly prepared for the class, you get so much more out of it than if you don’t read the case” but also recommends they keep their learning goals in context and “that you should not vary about the grades” and instead focus your effort on optimizing their learning, rather than their letter grade.