Mathew Isaac

Since joining the Albers School of Business and Economics in 2011, Associate Professor of Marketing Mathew Isaac, PhD, has been involved in several large-scale research projects for corporate clients and has coauthored numerous academic articles. Leading scientific journals have featured his work, as have Time, Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic and Fast Company. He has even appeared on New Zealand’s National Public Radio.

So why would this researcher-at-heart choose Seattle University, with its prioritization of teaching?

“I like that educating our students [at SU] is not an afterthought,” Isaac says. “I use a lot of project-based learning in the classroom that allows me to integrate my scholarship with my teaching. So, even though we’re not a research institution, we truly are balanced in a way a lot of universities are not.”

Isaac’s marketing students benefit from his studies of the psychology behind consumer behaviors and purchasing decisions. He weaves “high-level findings” throughout the undergraduate and MBA courses he teaches.

Isaac helped to develop the Digital Satisfaction Index™ that corporations worldwide now use to gauge consumer attitudes and perceptions of their online marketing experience.

In a project for Microsoft in which he collaborated with Northwestern University and the marketing agency Performics, a subsidiary of Publicis Media, Isaac helped develop a process to evaluate how close consumers were to making a purchase based on the keywords they entered into Microsoft’s Bing search engine.

Given the sensitive, personal data in the hands of marketers today, Isaac values Seattle U’s emphasis on ethics. “Companies have access to all this information about the consumer and need to take care to use it wisely but appropriately.”