My Expertise
Five Key Focus Areas:
- Customer culture and customer-centric leadership
- Market responsiveness measurement and organisational benchmarking
- AI in marketing and AI-augmented marketing capability
- B2B marketing strategy and enterprise customer experience
- Executive education and marketing leadership development
Customer Culture and Customer-Centric Leadership Dr Brown's research examines how organisational culture shapes customer outcomes, and how leaders deliberately build cultures that consistently win and retain customers. His doctoral research at Pepperdine produced the Customer-Centric Leadership Assessment Tool, and he is co-author of The Customer Culture Imperative (McGraw Hill, 2014, with Dr Linden Brown) and The Human Culture Imperative (2025, with Dr Linden R. Brown and Sean Crichton-Browne).
Market Responsiveness and Marketing Capability Measurement Dr Brown studies how organisations sense, respond to, and shape their markets, with particular interest in the cultural and behavioural disciplines that underpin sustained market performance. He is co-founder of MRI Benchmark, which commercialises the Market Responsiveness Index (MRI) — a diagnostic instrument deployed across more than 1,000 organisations globally, including Vodafone, Telstra, Deutsche Telekom, and Canon Medical.
AI in Marketing and AI-Augmented Marketing Capability Dr Brown's work in this area focuses on how marketing organisations adopt artificial intelligence responsibly and effectively — from individual practitioner skill development through to enterprise-level governance and capability building.
B2B Marketing Strategy and Enterprise Customer Experience Dr Brown has extensive experience in marketing strategy across complex B2B environments, including telecommunications, technology, medical devices, and professional services. His applied research and consulting has informed customer-centric transformation programmes at Vodafone (across 28 markets), Telstra, Canon Medical, Deutsche Telekom, and Konica Minolta.
Executive Education and Marketing Leadership Development Dr Brown has more than two decades of experience designing and delivering executive education programmes for senior marketing leaders, with prior teaching and faculty engagements at Harvard Corporate Learning, Pepperdine Graziadio Business School, and Insper (São Paulo).
Keywords
Fields of Research (FoR)
Marketing, Leadership, Organisational behaviour, Marketing management (incl. strategy and customer relations)Biography
Dr Chris L. Brown is an Education-Focused Senior Lecturer at AGSM @ UNSW Business School, where he teaches and develops curriculum at the intersection of marketing, customer-centric leadership, and AI in business practice. His return to AGSM is also a homecoming: Chris completed his Master's degree with a specialisation in Marketing at AGSM, having earlier graduated with a Bachelor of Business from UTS, majoring in Business and Accounting. He...view more
Dr Chris L. Brown is an Education-Focused Senior Lecturer at AGSM @ UNSW Business School, where he teaches and develops curriculum at the intersection of marketing, customer-centric leadership, and AI in business practice. His return to AGSM is also a homecoming: Chris completed his Master's degree with a specialisation in Marketing at AGSM, having earlier graduated with a Bachelor of Business from UTS, majoring in Business and Accounting. He subsequently earned a Doctor of Business Administration from Pepperdine Graziadio Business School, where his doctoral research produced the Customer-Centric Leadership Assessment Tool now used by senior leaders internationally.
Chris brings more than two decades of combined executive and academic experience to AGSM, including marketing leadership at HP South Pacific and executive education delivery for Harvard Corporate Learning, Pepperdine, and Insper (São Paulo). As CEO of MarketCulture Strategies and co-founder of MRI Benchmark, he has deployed the Market Responsiveness Index (MRI) across more than 1,000 organisations globally, including Vodafone, Telstra, Deutsche Telekom, and Canon Medical.
He is co-author of The Customer Culture Imperative (McGraw Hill, 2014, with Dr Linden Brown) and The Human Culture Imperative (2025, with Dr Linden R. Brown and Sean Crichton-Browne). His work has been endorsed by Professor Philip Kotler (The Father of Modern Marketing) and David Thodey AO.
His personal website is https://drchrislbrown.com/
My Qualifications
Bachelor of Business from UTS, majoring in Business and Accounting.
Master's degree with a specialisation in Marketing at AGSM. UNSW
Doctor of Business Administration from Pepperdine Graziadio Business School (Malibu, California)
My Awards
Marketing Book of the Year 2015 for The Customer Culture Imperative: A Leader's Guide to Driving Superior Performance
Available on Amazon
My Teaching
Marketing Management - MBA Program in the Australian Graduate School of Management (AGSM)
At the core of every successful business model are the organisation’s value propositions. Leaders of contemporary organisations must understand how the organisation creates and manages value propositions based on understanding the wants and needs of key stakeholders. This list of stakeholders includes existing and potential customers (a.k.a. clients or funding bodies), employees, suppliers, partners or collaborators, investors, government/regulators, and communities. Doing this successfully means that through appreciating the impacts of complex conditions in the external environment, contemporary leaders are better able to create, communicate, deliver, and sustain value for their stakeholders, and capture value for the organisation. This requires an understanding of the core processes and practices of marketing management.