Jeffrey Rayport

Biography

Jeffrey F. Rayport is a consultant, author, and founder and chairman of Marketspace LLC, a strategic advisory practice that works with leading companies to reinvent how they interact with and relate to customers. Marketspace was formerly a unit Monitor Deloitte, a global strategy services and merchant banking firm. Rayport is an authority on information-intensive industries such as media and entertainment, retail, and financial services. He has published a series of MBA-level textbooks on e-Commerce and a bestselling business book on integrating multi-channel customer experiences.[1] In 1996, his Fast Company article “The Virus of Marketing” introduced the concept of, and coined the term “viral marketing.” He is on the faculty of the Harvard Business School in the Entrepreneurial Management Unit. He has been voted outstanding professor multiple years. At HBS, Rayport developed and taught the first graduate-level e-commerce course in the United States, “Managing Marketspace Businesses” in 1995. Business plans produced by Rayport’s students resulted in various high-tech start-ups, including Yahoo!

Research Interest

Rayport earned an A.B. from Harvard College, an M.Phil. in International Relations at the University of Cambridge (U.K.), and an A.M. and Ph.D. in the History of American Civilization at Harvard University. He has served as a director of several public and private corporations; current directorships include Andrews McMeel Universal, GSI Commerce (NASDAQ:GSIC), International Data Group, Valueclick (NASDAQ:VCLK) and Monster Worldwide. He also serves on the advisory boards of advertising agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky and public relations firm Brodeur (a unit of Omnicom Group; NYSE: OMC). In addition, he is a trustee of the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA; a director of the Nantucket Preservation Trust inNantucket, MA; and a director of From the Top (a classical music program distributed in the United States by National Public Radio) in Boston, MA.