Meet Dr. Shawn Scott - Marketing

During a long and successful career in marketing, consumer behavior, branding, and advertising, Shawn Scott managed to squeeze in more than a decade and a half as an adjunct professor — on the side — at Johnson & Wales University, Bryant University, and the University of Rhode Island (as a research and teaching assistant).

But after earning his Ph.D. in business administration and marketing from URI in 2021, Dr. Scott decided to “make the leap” from teaching multiple classes in his spare time to accepting a full-time job in academia. In the fall of 2022, he joined the faculty of Curry College as an assistant professor of marketing. His experience in the industry includes 15 years at Hasbro, the toymaker, as a leader on their global brand team. Among other notable clients and products, Dr. Scott managed multimillion-dollar marketing campaigns for Disney, Star Wars, Transformers, and other well-known brands. In addition to retail, Scott also has worked in the restaurant and travel industries. In 2014, he launched Shawn Scott Consulting, and continues to work with select clients when his teaching schedule permits.

“Even while I was working in industry, I always stayed connected to colleges and universities,” Dr. Scott says. “As soon as I had my master’s degree [from Bryant in 2002], schools would bring me on as a guest speaker, which turned into moonlighting as an adjunct professor through the majority of my career. Once I formed my own consulting company, that freed me up to teach more and more classes, and it just got to a point where I wanted to make the leap full-time.”

In his first year as a School of Business and Computer Science faculty member at Curry, Dr. Scott already is making a  name for himself. His approach to teaching incorporates the model of flexibility and improvisation essential to the business world and applies it to his lessons. Eschewing the traditional lecture model, Dr. Scott typically introduces a theory to his students early in the week and spends the majority of class time helping them apply it to real-world situations through a workshop model that encourages them to use their problem-solving skills. As an example, Dr. Scott’s Consumer Behavior students recently delivered final presentations based on a self-selected brand or category chosen at the beginning of the semester.

“As they learned new concepts in consumer behavior from week to week, they applied that theory to their projects,” Dr. Scott explains. “They divided into breakout sessions and I jumped from team to team to help them workshop the concepts. Whenever I would see that everybody was having the same speed bump, I stopped the class and we shared our ideas. They learn from each other as much as they learn from me.”

Dr. Scott enjoys bringing his career experience to the classroom setting, and offering his students a strong base of practical knowledge to go along with the requisite theoretical background. Since being brought on to help grow the marketing program at Curry, Dr. Scott has taught Marketing Management, Consumer Behavior, and Marketing Research. In 2023-2024, he will add Digital Marketing and Marketing Analytics to his roster — two classes new to the Curry curriculum. So far, Scott has noticed an interdisciplinary trend that is bringing students to the School of Business and Computer Science from other majors, ranging from sociology to social health and wellness to graphic design.

“It really doesn’t matter what discipline you’re in; marketing is very useful,” Dr. Scott explains. “Whether you’re going for sociology or criminal justice, you want to run your own clinic, or you’re an artist and you want to open your own Etsy shop, marketing is everywhere —it’s transferrable to all the other disciplines at Curry.”

Over the next five years, Dr. Scott would like to see more students enrolling at Curry because of the strong reputation of its marketing program. He envisions the addition of course offerings and anticipates growth that will eventually be reflected by upwards of 100 marketing majors within the next few years; bringing in more professors to teach classes based on their own practical experiences; and an expansion of the digital marketing and data analytics programs.

“There are a lot of directions in which we can go,” Dr. Scott says. “I think it’s a combination of many things, but it all starts with the consumer, and our consumer is the Curry student and their potential employers. It will depend on what their interests are, where they need to go in a changing industry, and helping them get there.”