Anderson Graduate School of Management

Donna Hoffman

Professor of Marketing, Co-Director, Sloan Center of Internet Retailing

* The Albert O. Steffey Chair title alternates between Donna Hoffman and Tom Novak annually.

Donna L. Hoffman is the Albert O. Steffey Professor of Marketing and the Co-Director of the Sloan Center for Internet Retailing at the A. Gary Anderson Graduate School of Management at the University of California, Riverside. Professor Hoffman is an internationally recognized academic expert and sought after industry speaker in the areas of social media, online consumer behavior, and digital marketing trends and has worked with major corporations on the topic of digital marketing strategy, including Procter & Gamble, Intel, Microsoft, FedEx.com, Land’s End/Sears, Walmart.com, and many others. She also serves as an Academic Trustee of the Marketing Science Institute.

Professor Hoffman’s research is funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the National Science Foundation and the Marketing Science Institute. She has been awarded many of the field’s most prestigious research awards, including the Robert B. Clarke Educator of the Year Award from the DMEF, the Sheth Foundation/Journal of Marketing Award for long-term contributions to the discipline of marketing, the Stellner Distinguished Scholar Award from the University of Illinois, the William O’Dell/Journal of Marketing Research Award for long-term research impact and the Robert D. Buzzell Marketing Science Institute Best Paper Award Honorable Mention. She is also an MSI “Challenges of Communications and Branding in a Digital Era” research proposal competition winner.

She co-founded and co-directs the first academic center for electronic commerce in the United States. The New York Times calls her pioneering effort “one of the premiere research centers in the world for the study of electronic commerce” and the Wall Street Journal recognizes the effort as the “electronic commerce pioneer among business schools.”

Professor Hoffman publishes widely on the topics of consumer behavior in online environments and Internet marketing strategy in many of the top academic and managerial journals. Her Ph.D. is from the L.L. Thurstone Psychometric Laboratory at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and she was a faculty member at Columbia University, the University of Texas and Vanderbilt University before joining the University of California. She has also served as a visiting professor at UCLA, Stanford and USC. She was named a Distinguished Graduate Alumnus of UNC in 2002. More information on Professor Hoffman may be obtained by visiting eLab and the Sloan Center at http://sloan.ucr.edu/    

Recent Scholarship

Journal Publications

• Hoffman, D.L. and M. Fodor (2010), “Can You Measure the ROI of Your Social Media Marketing?” Sloan Management Review, 52(1), Fall, 41-49.
• Hoffman, D., Kopalle, P., Novak, T. (2010) The “Right” Consumers for Better Concepts: Identifying Consumers High in Emergent Nature to Develop New Product Concepts,” Journal of Marketing Research, 47 (October). Honorable Mention: 2011 Robert D. Buzzell MSI Best Paper Award for significant contribution to marketing practice and thought. 

Letters, Comments and Reviews

• Hoffman, D.L. (forthcoming), “CB As I See It,” feature to appear in Consumer Behavior: Buying, Having, and Being by Michael Solomon. Tenth Edition, Prentice Hall.
• Hoffman, D.L. and Novak. T.P (in press), “Marketing Communication in a Digital Era,” Marketing Management, American Marketing Association.
• Hoffman, D.L. and T.P. Novak (2010), “Retweet: A Digital Meditation on the Power of Twitter.” Video Essay.

Proceeding Publications (Refereed)

• Hoffman, D.L. and T.P. Novak (2010), "Retweet: A Digital Meditation On The Power Of Twitter", in Advances in Consumer Research Volume 38, eds. Darren Dahl and Gita V. Johar and Stijn van Osselaer, Duluth, MN: Association for Consumer Research.
• Hoffman, D.L. (2010), "Navigating The Networked Rivers Of The Social Web: Emerging Themes For Consumer Behavior Research On Web 2.X", in Advances in Consumer Research Volume 37, eds. Margaret C. Campbell and Jeff Inman and Rik Pieters, Duluth, MN: Association for Consumer Research.