Mary Caravella
Emeritus Faculty
Marketing
Education/Professional Certification
D.B.A., Harvard Business School
M.B.A., Harvard Business School
B.S.E.E., Marquette University
Areas of Expertise
marketing strategy, positive environmental and social impact through business strategy, business model innovation for demand generation, retail strategy, cross-channel strategies for customer lead generation and engagement, professional selling.
Biography
Dr. Mary Caravella has taught marketing strategy, professional sales, and business strategy for environmental and social impact across undergraduate and graduate degree programs at UConn. Mary has been recognized for her innovation and expertise in teaching by both colleagues and students, including as a four-time winner of UConn’s MBA Marketing Professor of the Year award.
Most of Mary’s intellectual energy has been devoted to helping her students learn and apply marketing knowledge and skills. In addition to teaching, she published teaching cases and advised student startups and small businesses on marketing strategy. With her focus on experiential learning, Mary regularly incorporated live projects into her courses and led an annual MBA Case Challenge and a biannual Professional Sales role-play competition for many years. In addition to continually innovating in her own courses, Mary led a task force that redesigned UConn’s MBA Program and was a founding faculty member of UConn’s Online MBA program, its Entrepreneurship Bootcamp for Veterans, and its MS in Social Responsibility and Impact in Business.
Mary’s research expertise is in helping marketers integrate interpersonal interactions with digital and physical marketing channels to reach new customers across a wide range of business contexts, including business-to-business professional services and technology, retailing, nonprofit marketing and fundraising, and organizations focused on environmental and social impact. She has published in the Journal of Marketing, the Journal of Marketing Research, and the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science. Her research with colleagues on the strategic interaction of digital and physical retail channels was recognized by the American Marketing Association for its significant long-term contribution to research on marketing channels. Her dissertation research on prospective customers’ reactions to lead-generation programs was recognized for excellence by the Institute for the Study of Business Markets.
Before her academic career, Mary worked for nearly a decade in sales, marketing, and change-leadership roles at GE Fanuc Automation, a factory automation joint venture. She proudly supports her husband and son as they lead their family business, CNC Engineering. Mary has an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering from Marquette University, and both an MBA and a doctorate from Harvard Business School.
