Vivienne Long: From Leading Brands to Shaping Future Leaders

After departing her role as Chief Marketing Officer at REI, Vivienne Long felt a pull to the classroom. While she has been teaching an intrapreneurship course at the University of Washington Foster School of Business since 2019, she realized she wanted to devote even more time to teaching, mentoring, and advising emerging business leaders. Now, Foster is honored to welcome her as a full-time Professor of Practice in the Department of Marketing and International Business. This year, she’ll be teaching in the MBA program, including Entrepreneurial Marketing, B2B Marketing, and Intrapreneurship: New Product Development, and working on additional departmental projects.

Long is excited to share her passion for the strategic side of marketing and launching innovative new products within organizations, along with insights she’s gained over 30 years of growing brands for companies like Procter & Gamble, Microsoft, Clorox, Starbucks, and REI. She appreciates the strong connections between Foster and the Seattle business community, providing students with valuable networking opportunities and real-world experience.

A space for learning and growth

Vivienne Long is eager to learn from her students, too. Long sees teaching at Foster as a way to stay abreast of rapid changes in consumer behavior and emerging technologies like generative AI and nanotechnology. She says, “I want to be in a university environment where I can think about where the future is going. While working as a CMO, you don’t really have as much time to think long term and outside of your industry. You’re constantly responding to the business.”

Long appreciates the Foster School’s commitment to creating a welcoming, supportive environment where students from diverse backgrounds can learn and grow. She sees Foster’s location within the University of Washington as a significant advantage, offering interdisciplinary learning through partnerships with departments including engineering, computer science, and health sciences. She likes that “we’re learning business not in a vacuum, but in the context of some pretty dynamic environments.”

Taking leaps of faith and embracing ambiguity

Vivienne Long’s teaching philosophy emphasizes the importance of conviction, adaptability, and the ability to balance analytical and creative skills effectively. She believes career success requires adapting a strong vision to changing markets and consumer needs. She challenges students to think beyond the product and focus on creating customer value, driven by a deep understanding of consumer needs and problems.

Long also encourages her students to develop a comfort level with taking “leaps of faith.” This is especially important in fields like consumer insights, where much of the data is qualitative and requires intuition and the ability to connect the dots. She teaches students to explore possibilities and “get comfortable in that ambiguity, take leaps, and have hypotheses or guesses even when there’s no one right answer.”

Long creates case studies to help students apply these concepts in real-world settings, interviewing industry professionals to provide relevant, up-to-date insights. “It’s less about the textbook and more about what people experience day-to-day,” she says.

Vivienne Long’s advice for making the most of the Foster MBA experience

Vivienne Long offers two pieces of advice to Foster MBA students looking to make the most of their Foster MBA experience:

First, build a robust professional network. While the knowledge they’ll gain in a Foster MBA program in Seattle is important, she says that building relationships with fellow students, faculty, and staff will have a lasting impact on their careers. “The knowledge you gain is great, but at some point, it will become obsolete as information changes. Building your network is even more important.”

Second, seek out practical experience through internships. She stresses the importance of finding a career path that aligns with their passions and thrives in a culture that supports their work style. Long encourages students to view internships as a way to test their assumptions about different industries and work environments so students can figure out where they do their best work.

Long appreciates the opportunities Foster MBA students have to try different things. She says, “If you’re looking to make a career change, go get a little experience working in that area to figure out if it’s really what you’re passionate about. Learning is different from doing. At Foster, you have the opportunity to do both.”