Wolfgang Ulaga

Wolfgang Ulaga is a Professor of Management Practice and Co-Director of INSEAD’s Marketing & Sales Excellence Initiative (MSEI). He works with executives, managers, scholars, and students around the globe on building and growing key competencies and skills in marketing and sales of products, services, customer solutions, and new digitally-driven business models – in both consumer and business-to-business (B2B) markets.

Wolfgang’s executive education activities focus on helping firms achieve marketing and commercial excellence through customer-centric growth, a true service culture, a focus on strategically competing through service excellence, and superior pricing strategies. His most recent work focuses on translating data and analytics into innovative digital services and subscription-based recurring revenue models that differentiate companies from competition through outstanding digital customer experiences in FMCG markets, professional services, and industrial goods industries.

Since more than 25 years, Dr. Ulaga serves as an educator, scholar, and frequent keynote speaker. He regularly consults with companies and designs and directs custom and open executive education programs and workshops for corporations in a broad cross-section of industries. He is the Co-Director of INSEAD’s open executive education B2B Marketing Strategies Programme for leading transformation and change in a digital world.

Wolfgang holds a PhD (Doctorat en Sciences de Gestion) from the University of Paris 1, Pantheon-Sorbonne. He received his Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches (HDR) from University Paris-Dauphine. Further, Wolfgang was awarded a Honorary Doctorate in Economics by Turku University’s School of Economics (Finland) for his pioneering research on customer value and servitization strategies in B2B. His research investigates how firms implement value-based marketing and sales in the organization, craft service-growth strategies, develop new service business models in emerging and mature markets, design B2B service portfolios, turn free services into revenue and profit engines (Free-to-Fee), transition from a product-centric to a service-savvy salesforce, monetize data and analytics via innovative pricing approaches, and grow their top- and bottom line through innovative subscription-based recurring revenue models in the fast-growing Subscription Economy.

Dr. Ulaga has published numerous articles in leading academic and managerial journals, including Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review, Journal of Marketing, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science (JAMS), Journal of Business Research (JBR), Journal of Service Research (JSR), and Industrial Marketing Management (IMM), among many others. He has authored several practitioner-oriented books, including Data Monetization: A Practical Roadmap for Framing, Pricing, and Selling your B2B Digital Offers (2018) and Service Strategy in Action: A Practical Guide for Growing Your B2B Service and Solution Business (2017), translated into Italian and Japanese.

Wolfgang has received numerous awards and recognitions, including the Dean’s Commendation for Excellence in Teaching at INSEAD, Arizona State University’s W.P. Carey Business School Most Impactful MBA Marketing Concentration Professor, and HEC Paris’ Best Teacher of the Year Award. He received the prestigious 2021 ISBM-David T. Wilson-Sheth Foundation Award for Long Term Impact on the Theory and Practice of B2B Marketing and the American Marketing Association’s (AMA) 2011 Winter Educator's Conference Overall Best Paper Award. Wolfgang also won numerous recognitions for case writing, such as The Case Center’s Award for Top 10 Best-Selling Case Authors in 2021 (Top 40 since 2015), its Top 15 globally best-selling Marketing cases, Annual Best-Selling Marketing Case (2015), Classic Case Collection (2021), and Outstanding Case Writer Award (2016). Finally, he received the 2021 Brandon Hall Group HCM Excellence Award (Bronze) in the Category: Best Advance in Competencies and Skill Development for the innovative design and delivery of INSEAD’s tailed executive education program for global energy company ENGIE’s “Customer Academy ENGIE University X INSEAD”.

Prior to joining INSEAD, Wolfgang was on the full-time faculties at Arizona State University (AT&T Professor of Services Leadership), IMD Business School Lausanne, HEC School of Management Paris (Electricité de France Professor of Marketing), ESCP-EAP Paris, and EDHEC Lille, where he served as a Department Chair. He also served as a Visiting Professor at the Mendoza College of Business, University of Notre Dame, Indiana. Before starting his career in academia, he worked in Frankfurt and Paris as a consultant for DML & Associés, an international management consulting firm.