Marketing, Politics, and Putting Customers First

Kim, a marketing professor who joined Tuck just a few months before, after teaching at the Darden School of Business, ran the session like one of her classes, using lots of objective data and moderating an interactive discussion. The point of the gathering was to look at the election through a marketing lens, analyzing how the Trump and Harris campaigns leveraged various digital channels. Kim was careful to not make any subjective judgments about the campaigns; instead, she presented materials from each campaign—including website interfaces, email subject lines, and influencer partnerships across platforms like TikTok and Instagram—and guided participants in evaluating what worked and what didn’t.

When the session was over, Kim had a good sense of the room’s take. “A lot of students came up to me and said, ‘After seeing what we saw today, I don’t think there’s any way Harris can win,’” Kim recalls. After the election, more students came up to her and said they weren’t surprised by the outcome, given what they learned after attending her session the week before.

“I think there’s a lot that can be learned by looking at the world through a business lens,” Kim offers.

It’s fitting that dissecting the marketing strategy of political campaigns was one of the first things Kim did at Tuck, since Kim got into marketing through her fascination with politics. She spent her high school years in Lakewood, Washington, near Joint Base Lewis-McChord, and recalls her friends campaigning for republican candidates.

When she was at Harvard as an undergraduate, she witnessed the overwhelming sense of joy on campus when Barack Obama was elected. “It was an interesting juxtaposition to go from one context to the next,” she says. At the time, her political beliefs were still being formed, but she decided to major in government and took several classes with former Harvard president Claudine Gay, who became Kim’s thesis advisor. While Kim was writing her thesis, she worked part-time as a research assistant for Michael Norton, a professor in the Negotiation, Organizations & Markets unit at Harvard Business School (HBS). Those two simultaneous experiences gave her an epiphany.

“I realized I was really interested in political campaigns, which is essentially marketing,” Kim says. Her work with Norton eventually steered her towards pursuing a Ph.D. in marketing at HBS, and Norton became her thesis advisor.

Kim couldn’t have predicted it, but she ended up following in the footsteps of her father, who was a marketing professor at Korea University. He specialized in advertising, celebrity endorsements and branding. And, as Kim vividly recalls, he loved his job. “Even when I was six or seven years old, I remember he would always say to the family: ‘This is the best job in the world. You get to study what you want and come up with your own questions,’” she says. When Kim was thinking about what to do after college, she knew she’d be lucky to do something she loved as much as her dad loved being a professor.

These days, as an associate professor at Tuck, the questions Kim comes up with are usually related to the intersection of marketing, law, and politics. More specifically, Kim leverages behavioral insights to improve the customer experience on digital platforms and to make the broader marketplace more equitable.

Kim’s work on digital platforms mainly focuses on users’ beliefs on how platforms should be run and how that informs the types of policies that platforms implement. One example in this context is how consumers feel about their data being shared with advertisers. Another example is how users’ published posts on social media are moderated by platforms. Oftentimes, digital platforms are discussed in terms of social media, but they also include streaming platforms such as Netflix, Hulu, and Prime, and Kim has ongoing research looking at how consumers believe streaming platforms should handle controversial content. One of Kim’s most recent papers in this stream, published in the Journal of Consumer Research, is “When is Digital Censorship Permissible? A Conversation Norms Account.” In it, she finds that consumers expect digital platforms to make sure they consider content creators’ intent when deciding whether to censor a post. This finding relates to other findings she has made in this field, which point to a belief among users that digital platforms are public forums where they should be able to engage in free speech. These findings are consequential for digital platforms because content creation drives user engagement, and if content moderation policies don’t align with users’ expectations, platforms could lose their competitive advantage as users migrate to other places.

At Tuck, Kim teaches the core marketing course, something she did for seven years at Darden. She loves opening her students’ eyes to the world of marketing beyond what they might traditionally expect. “I like to show students there are a lot of quantitative and data-driven decisions involved in marketing,” she says. “It’s more than just advertising. It’s also about product innovation and pricing, and about forming channel relationships. I like showing how integral marketing is to every fundamental business decision.”

This fall, Kim will teach a new elective: Marketing Strategy in the Digital Economy. It will involve many of the cases she’s written in her career. “My research is so interlinked with what I teach, and I often get a lot of research ideas from students,” she says. “I love that two-way street.”

This story originally appeared in print in the summer 2025 issue of Tuck Today magazine.