Professor Jean-Pierre (J.P.) Dubé is more than just a marketing professor at Booth – he’s a leading expert in pricing strategy and the Director of Booth’s Kilts Center for Marketing. This Spring Quarter, he’s teaching Pricing Strategies (BUSN 37202) on Wednesdays from 1:30-4:30 PM at Harper Center, bringing his deep expertise and real-world insights to Booth students.
Known for his rigorous and data-driven approach, Professor Dubé pushes students beyond conventional MBA teachings, challenging them to apply real industry techniques rather than simplified academic models. In this interview, he discusses his teaching philosophy, the importance of pricing strategy, and why Booth students stand out. Beyond academics, he shares his favorite travel destinations, hobbies like heli-skiing, and even his must-have personal belongings.
Read on to discover why Professor Dubé believes finance and marketing should be the most powerful combination for future business leaders and why his Pricing Strategies course could be one of the most valuable classes you take at Booth.
What’s your favorite thing about teaching Booth students?
I can get away with way more technical and more rigorous material here at Booth then I could at a peer MBA school. I know this for a fact because I’ve had some of my former PhD students take my pricing curriculum and try and teach it in peer schools. One of them got feedback that he can’t have students running regressions. I said, “how else would you estimate the elasticity of demand?” and asked, “did you explain to them that this is actually what people are doing in industry.” My former student said “Yeah, but the *peer school* MBAs didn’t want to run a regression. They said, ‘that’s for stats class.’” So, I never have problems like this at Booth. In general, I find if you can convince students here that something is useful, they’re open to trying it. The students here are very capable because our admissions screening mechanisms are very good. So, we have top-quality students, but then amongst these top-quality students, I can get away with assigning more than I could at one of the other M7 schools. And the result is I’m teaching a class that looks like pricing the way I would do pricing with a company instead of some sort of simplified toy model. It’s more fun for me.
When you’re not in Chicago, what are a couple of your favorite places to travel?
I lived as a kid in Paris for a few years. I went to school there when I was younger. So, I go there once a year – I love to go to Paris. I love to go to Portugal. I have in-laws in Portugal, and I love Portuguese food and wine. So those are my two favorite European destinations. I have not been as often as I would like to go, but I love Cambodia. That might be the country where I was the most struck – there’s a lot of poverty in Cambodia, but it was just culturally so rich. I love that country!
Give us a sales pitch. Why should students take Pricing Strategy with you?
I think every week there’s at least one thing you’re going to learn that you can use right away for your job. I think people may not always be directly involved in sales and monetization, but there’s always going to be something relevant. And I can vouch for that, because everything I’ve done in this course now, there’s always a lesson component, but there’s all my own personal experiences. And I’ve done all of this. A big part of why I dabbled a little bit in consulting was to see things like: do these conjoint studies really work? Can you really get a good elasticity estimate? And will the firm monetize better with this elasticity? And I’ve assembled this collection of things that work, not to mention a few things that I tried that were miserable failures that I bring in as cautionary tales.
I really believe in the Chicago Booth approach. That’s how I’ve structured all my lectures. What does the theory say? How can we get data to measure things, and can we get validations that the theory pans out in the field? And then how do we validate all of this, what’s the ROI and then do a case study to show “hey, when you do this, for this company, here’s how they made more money, and this is how it turned out.”
You’re gonna run into an executive who’s gonna say, “this is how we do things” but then you’re armed with a theory and you know what the right answer is, but how do you actually sell that vision to the company? It’s almost like objection handling. It’s persuasion and sometimes internal marketing.
If you had to recommend one class at Booth that students should take, what’s one that you think is important?
That’s a great question. It depends what you’re looking for. Emir Kamenica’s Game Theory class is really going to push you in terms of thinking. I don’t know if it’s gonna give you tools you’re going to use at work right out of the blocks but it’s gonna teach you how to think and that’s another example of a class that you might not take at a peer school, but Booth students might take and really enjoy. I’ve heard nothing but unbelievable, unbelievable praise for Marianne Bertrand’s the Firm and the Non-Market Environment. I know students love the curriculum for our marketing classes, so I always recommend that students take both Data Driven Marketing and Pricing Strategies and pair that with finance classes. I view data driven marketing and pricing as extremely synergistic. I don’t understand why finance and marketing as a double concentration isn’t the most popular thing to do right now. You take data driven marketing and pricing, you’re ready to hit the ground running for any strategy role, you’re ready to hit the ground running for management consulting. I mean, the new path to CEO should be somebody who can be a good modern chief marketing officer.
What are some of your hobbies or things you enjoy doing for fun?
I like to ski. I ski a lot. So winter is like yeah, that’s like my family ski pictures you see here on my desk. I really like skiing so I try to get out as much as I can. I have an annual heli-ski trip which is the highlight but also the end of my season. And that way all the skiing in the season is me just preparing so that I can last through each day of my four day heli-skiing trip.
What are some of the places you like to ski?
My favorite resort in the world is Snowbird. I usually go there at least twice a season. I love to ski there because it has the best snow and, in my opinion, the most fun terrain. The resort still hasn’t been bought by Vail or monopolized. Not insanely expensive, and it’s not a fashion show. People go to Snowbird to ski so it’s unbelievable fun. But I think my favorite location to be skiing is the heli-skiing I go to is in eastern British Columbia – it’s not high altitude so it’s easy on the on the lungs, and they just get heaps and heaps of snow and it’s not wet and heavy. It’s not as dry as Utah but it’s almost as good.
Who’s a Booth professor whose research you really admire and why?
Sanjog Misra, who’s in our marketing group has a Research paper on sales force management that I think is awesome. Like this is an example of a paper where you read it and you go “I wish I’d written this paper”. His paper takes basic agency theory and recognizes that you can’t expect your sales reps to want to do what’s best for the company, they’re going to do what’s best for themselves. And since it’s a pain in the butt to sell, they’re going to they’re going to be a little bit lazy. They’re not going to want to exert effort unless they think it pays off and that creates a problem that when you look at sales force performance, you never know if somebody had a good quarter because they were lucky or because they tried hard. And that’s the classic “how do you incentivize a sales rep” question. The usual literature says to give people commissions. If you look in the real world most sales comps are way more complicated. They have a whole bunch of gimmicks. You have minimums and maximums and quotas. So you don’t get any commission until you hit some threshold. Right? But then on top of that, then they’re worried about what happens if you have a banner year and they end up having to spend a lot of money on you – which is odd because if you’re having a banner year, that seems like it’d be good for the firm. So, you have all these weird gimmicks. People who are far away from hitting their goal just give up. Everyone’s trying in the first quarter. And then people who are doing well in the third month who are clearly going to hit their quota start decelerating once it’s clear they’ll make it because there’s no point overworking if you’re going to hit the cap. They basically delay their sales to the next period. And so what Sanjog did is he went and took theory and estimated a model. What theory says is that the optimal contract is a flat commission. He used his model and implemented for the company, and the company’s profits (or maybe sales) went up 20%. You look at the data and all that gaming you saw from month to month, it disappears because the sales reps aren’t incentivized to delay, or accelerate, or decelerate, right. Isn’t that awesome? I mean, like, it’s a beautiful demonstration of the theory and he made the company a lot of money.
Tell us about an influential moment in your career, or an obstacle you had to overcome.
Good question… a major obstacle… I mean, I think going through the tenure process was one of the most harrowing experiences. It’s a big, big stress when you’re young. More recently maybe having a family and dealing with sick parents and then needing to balance that with your job where you need to be concentrating. If you’re doing deeply analytical work, it’s difficult if you have outside distractions. I didn’t start having kids until my wife and I were in our late 20s because we didn’t want to have our kids early. And I’m dealing with sick and dying parents and things like that. It was very hard to manage. And how do you remain successful? How do you remain focused? In most jobs, you can get a little bit of time off, but at some point, you know, you got to keep working. And so I guess that would probably be the biggest obstacle is how do you how do you have a family when you’re young? What a lot of people do now is they just delay having a family until later in their life, until their career is stabilized, but then the downside is and you’re gonna be older when you go to your kids’ graduation.
What’s a favorite book of yours and why?
My favorite book? I love modern American novels. I think the American dream is a fascinating theme and I’m Canadian. So, I really love Middlesex. It’s a relatively contemporary novel that tells the story of European immigrants and all their challenges in integrating in the US, bringing with them all the baggage of the horror stories they left behind in the war, and then trying to rise and participate in the American dream. It involves cultural shifts, white flight, you know, and race riots and whatnot. It’s a great book: a lot of culture, a lot of history, and a lot of trying to navigate the American system within American society.
If you can only keep three of your belongings which ones would you choose and why?
I guess I like my ski boots for obvious reasons. I got these custom these custom inserts and they fit perfectly. I couldn’t believe how much different the skiing experience was when you have a properly fitted boot. Other than that, I suppose I like my wine. For the third one, I feel like I’m supposed to say something really poetic, but I really can’t think of a third thing.
