About the Author

Professor Nigel Piercy BA, MA, PhD, DLitt, FCIM, is one of the best-known business school academics in marketing and strategy in the UK. He was previously Associate Dean and Professor of Marketing and Strategy at Warwick Business School, having earlier held a chair in strategic marketing at Cranfield School of Management, where he was head of the marketing group. Before Cranfield and Warwick, he held the Sir Julian Hodge Chair in Marketing and Strategy at Cardiff Business School. He is now a consultant and management writer, with visiting posts at a number of universities. In addition to UK business school experience, he has been a visiting professor at: Texas Christian University; the University of California, Berkeley; Columbia Graduate School of Business, New York; the Fuqua School of Business, Duke University, North Carolina; Athens Laboratory of Business Administration; and, the Vienna University of Business and Economics. He has presented seminars and workshops at business schools throughout the world. He has managerial experience in retailing, and was in business planning with Nycomed Amersham plc (now part of GE Healthcare).

He has extensive experience as a consultant and management workshop speaker with many organizations in different parts of the world – he has worked with managers and management students in the UK, the USA, Europe, Finland, Greece, the Far East, South Africa and Zimbabwe. He focuses on issues of market strategy development, planning and implementation, and strategic sales management, and recent company clients include: Mitie, Daimler, TNT, EMC, EON, Amey plc, British Telecom, Allied Dunbar, Ford Cellular, AT&T, Honeywell, AIB Group, ICL, Yellow Pages, and Shell, as well as other smaller organizations. He has presented and chaired management development programmes for: the Chartered Institute of Marketing; the Chartered Management Institute; the Institute of Directors; the Tavistock Institute; Cranfield School of Management, Warwick Business School, and Henley Business School.

His research interests are in strategic marketing and strategy implementation, recently emphasizing the sales/marketing interface and the impact of strategic customers on buyer–seller relationships. Professor Piercy has published more than 20 books and written around 300 articles and papers appearing in the management literature throughout the world. Recent books include: Marketing Strategy & Competitive Positioning, 6th edition (with Graham Hooley, Brigitte Nicoulaud and John Rudd) (Pearsons, 2016) and Strategic Marketing, 10th edition (with David W. Cravens) (Burr Ridge IL: McGraw-Hill/Irwin, 2013). He is also co-author with Nikala Lane of Strategic Customer Management: Strategizing the Sales Organization (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). He is co-author of the European edition of Kotler’s Principles of Marketing text (Philip Kotler, Gary Armstrong, Lloyd C Harris and Nigel Piercy – Pearson, 6th edition, 2013; 7th edition 2016). He is co-editor with David Cravens and Ken Fitzhugh of The Oxford Handbook of Strategic Sales and Sales Management (Oxford University Press, 2012).

Among other awards and prizes, he was the UK Marketing Author of the Year for three years. He has published many academic papers, including those in the Journal of Marketing, the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science; the Journal of World Business, the British Journal of Management, and the Journal of Business Research, and has written on management and marketing issues in the Sunday Times and the Independent newspapers.

He prefers cats to people and believes that Business Cat should be the model for the modern executive.