Omar Rodriguez-Vila
Assistant Professor, Marketing & Strategy
Scheller College of Business, Georgia Institute of Technology
Omar Rodriguez Vila joined the Scheller College of Business at the Georgia Institute of Technology in the summer of 2012, after earning a PhD in Marketing from the Goizueta Business School at Emory University. He also holds an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University in Evanston, IL.
Dr. Rodriguez Vila research focuses on the evolution of marketing capabilities driven by two external forces: technology changes and sustainability. In the area of sustainability, he has advised numerous companies on their design of social purpose strategies for brands. His work with Sundar Bharadwaj on the integration of societal benefits and growth strategies entitled “Competing on Social Purpose” was published in the Harvard Business Review on September 2017. He is also the principal investigator of “The Practice of Purpose” project, in partnership with Sustainable Brands and the Ray C. Anderson Center for Sustainable Business. In it he is leading a team of researchers into the study of unique capabilities necessary for successful managing brands with social purpose.
Prior to his academic career, Dr. Rodriguez Vila held numerous marketing leadership roles at The Coca‐Cola Company including Global Manager of Marketing Capabilities, where he led a research initiative to define and measure the capabilities of winning marketing organizations across 45 countries. He was also the Global Vice‐President for Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC) and Integrated Marketing director for Coca-Cola China.
As an educator, Dr. Rodriguez Vila has been recognized for the past three years with the Core Professor of the Year Award for his work teaching marketing strategy and sustainability to MBA students. He has also been a recipient of the Institute-wide teaching effectiveness award and the Undergraduate teacher of the year.