Charla Mathwick joined the School of Business at Portland State University in 1998 upon completing her Ph.D. in Marketing at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. Prior to entering academia, Dr. Mathwick spent a decade in industry working in financial services and telecommunications and holding positions in marketing strategy, product development, and marketing management.
At PSU, she has taught a variety of classes in the MBA, the Master of International Management, and the Oregon Executive MBA programs, delivering courses in Innovation, Lean Start-up Strategy, Customer Relationship Management, e-Services Marketing, and Market Research. She is the co-creator of Launch-in-9, a cross-disciplinary curricular option that brought PSU’s engineering, computer science, and business school students together to evaluate the feasibility of student-initiated start-ups while earning capstone credit.
Dr. Mathwick’s research activities involve two distinct research streams. The first addresses perceptions of customer value in the online consumer and virtual community context. She specifically investigates online interaction, examining consumer perception, motivation, psychological state, and social connectedness as it relates to customer intentions, commitment, and value. Her second research stream exists within the emerging domain of entrepreneurial marketing with a focus on the use of metrics surrounding customer relationship management and business model design. This work is an outgrowth of her long-term involvement with the local startup community, two decades of MBA instruction largely focused on innovation and business startup, and her professional and academic background in strategic marketing management. Dr. Mathwick has been published in numerous academic journals including Journal of Retailing, Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Service Research, Journal of Interactive Marketing, Journal of Marketing Management, and the Case Research Journal. She continues to serve on numerous editorial boards and remains active in research related to entrepreneurial marketing with a specific emphasis on the role of women in the startup world.