Dr. Sylvia Long-Tolbert

VP Mentorship + Professional Development

Dr. Sylvia Long-Tolbert (she/her) is a multifaceted marketing professional who actively works at the intersection of marketing strategy, graduate and executive education, and behavioral research. She has extensive experience helping business organizations and innovation teams identify, design, deliver and measure innovative solutions that address unmet market needs driven by dynamic social, cultural or behavioral trends. Under her leadership and coaching, she has enabled the launch of new market opportunities, new sources of customer value, and growth in social responsibility awareness among business practitioners.

Dr. Long-Tolbert’s mission is to embrace marketplace and social shifts, disrupt conventional business practices and reject status quo thinking in favor of human-centered ideas. She consistently champions a customer/user voice, using data to close intelligence gaps and provide context for understanding complex business problems and authentic customer experiences. Dr. Long-Tolbert maintains an experimental mindset to uncover novel insights that can transform strategic thinking and problem solving beyond marketing or design teams to motivate enduring behavioral change.

Her primary research interests include brand reputation, stakeholder behavior, customer-brand relationships and social identity. That work includes the use of qualitative and quantitative research methods to examine applied topics on service failures and recovery, customer emotions, customer loyalty and design thinking innovations.

As the principal of Know More Marketing®, Dr. Long-Tolbert translates data-driven insights into stories that uniquely frame complex business problems and inform actionable recommendations on strategic, operational and employee development issues. She has educated industry leaders and managers using customized frameworks that draw on her informed views on marketing thought topics, new scientific discoveries and management best practices. Dr. Long-Tolbert is constantly searching for new pathways for clients to grow their businesses by providing differentiated experiences intended for a global, multicultural and socially connected world.

Dr. Long-Tolbert holds a PhD and MABA from The Ohio State University, with specializations in marketing, social psychology and statistical theory. She is a founding member and former officer of the American Marketing Association’s Diversity and Marketing special interest group (DAMSIG) and Services Marketing special interest group (SERVSIG), co-founder of Marketing Ethnic Faculty Association and longtime member of National Black MBA Association.