Barbara Bund

Barbara E. Bund specializes in marketing strategy, as a consultant and as a Senior Lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management. As explained in The Outside-in Corporation (McGraw-Hill 2006), she focuses on the challenge of driving an organization's marketplace strategy and tactics clearly and explicitly from the perspective of the customer - from the outside in. While acknowledging that the outside-in perspective is often difficult to achieve and maintain, she argues that it is also critical to marketplace success.

Dr. Bund has been an independent consultant since 1987 and has taught at MIT since 1991. Previously, she spent three years at the consulting firm Index Systems (where she was a vice president) and eleven years as a professor at Harvard Business School. She holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University and an A.B. from Radcliffe College. She has published numerous articles and eight books. In addition to The Outside-in Corporation, her best known publications are "Build Customer Relationships that Last" (Harvard Business Review) and Winning and Keeping Industrial Customers (Lexington Books). Those publications introduced the framework of transaction customers and relationship customers (which has been widely used -- for example, used by Dell to segment its customers as it built its position in the market -- and which is discussed briefly in The Outside-in Corporation).