For more than three decades, Gies College of Business professor Aric Rindfleisch has been a defining voice in digital marketing education, helping shape how learners around the world understand technology, marketing, and the human side of business. He has also been a familiar, influential presence in Gies Business’ fully online MBA program – known as the iMBA®, which is celebrating its 10-year anniversary in 2026.
A leading scholar of technology and innovation in the digital world, Rindfleisch’s connection to the iMBA program runs deep. Rindfleisch taught one of the very first courses in the program when it launched, and today he remains closely associated with its global reach and digital-first mission.
“I’ve been lucky to be part of the iMBA program from the beginning, and I taught one of the first courses in that program,” said Rindfleisch, the John M. Jones Professor of Marketing at Gies Business.
That early digital marketing course has grown into three wildly popular massive open online courses (MOOCs) on Coursera: Marketing in a Digital World, The Digital Marketing Revolution, and The 3D Printing Revolution, which have collectively reached more than 750,000 learners worldwide. Together, they rank among the most widely taken online marketing courses in the world.
“Combined, they’re the second most popular online marketing course in the world,” Rindfleisch said with a laugh. “Google has beaten me out, but that’s not too bad. They’re Google, and it’s just me.”
Rindfleisch’s success in reaching learners fuels his belief that teaching can be just as impactful as traditional academic research. “If I’m honest,” he said, “I think my most significant contribution to academia has been my teaching, not my research.”
Rindfleisch’s journey to becoming a marketing professor was anything but straightforward. As an undergraduate at Central Connecticut State University, he hadn’t yet envisioned an academic career. That changed thanks to several mentors who nudged him toward the idea of earning a PhD. Later, during his MBA studies at Cornell, a professor introduced him to the idea of becoming a marketing professor.
That conversation stuck, especially as Rindfleisch compared academic life to the realities of corporate work.
“I found I didn’t like working for a living – having to wear a suit and do things that others wanted me to do,” he said. “I really liked being a student a lot more than working.”
Soon after, he enrolled in the PhD program at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, choosing marketing because of its analytical rigor and his prior experience in marketing research.
Researching the human side of consumption
Although Rindfleisch is widely known for his teaching, his research has also left a lasting mark – particularly his work on materialism and well-being. Early in his career, he collaborated with longtime University of Virginia professor James Burroughs on a series of studies examining the value people place on acquiring material goods.
“We defined materialism as the value people place on the acquisition of material objects like expensive cars, homes, and clothes,” said Rindfleisch, who recently earned a prestigious appointment as an American Marketing Association Fellow. “We discovered a fairly robust negative correlation between materialistic aspirations and subjective well-being. People who value materials more on average may be less happy, more anxious, often depressed, sometimes lonely.”
Rindfleisch and Burroughs proposed what they called “conflicting values theory” to explain why. Drawing on psychologist Shalom Schwartz’s framework of human values, they argued that materialism often clashes with collective values such as family, community, and religion.
“What we found,” Rindfleisch said, “was that individuals who tried to hold both sets of values – materialism and collective-oriented values – tended to be the most unhappy.”
Whether teaching online or in person, Rindfleisch emphasizes relevance and experimentation. In his advanced marketing strategy course, students compete in a sophisticated simulation that mirrors real-world decision-making.
“They make all the strategic decisions of a marketing organization,” he said. “The effect of any one decision depends on what other teams are doing.”
In contrast, his “Making Things” course – taught in the Illinois MakerLab he helped establish – leans heavily into creativity and ambiguity. Student teams design, prototype, and manufacture a product of their choosing using 3D printing technology.
When asked what he wishes more business leaders understood, Rindfleisch pointed to his research on cooperation between competitors. “Competition is overrated,” he said. “You don’t always have to destroy competitors. In fact, it may not be a good idea. You can actually thrive by working with them.”
That perspective carries into his vision for business education itself. “The business school of the future would have much more humanity,” Rindfleisch said. In an era increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence, he believes the most enduring advantage will be deeply human qualities – empathy, creativity, and the ability to learn from failure.
“We probably can’t out-analyze AI or out-efficiency AI,” he said. “But we can be better humans than the robots.”
For iMBA students, that philosophy is already embedded in Rindfleisch’s courses, where cutting-edge technology meets human judgment, and where marketing is treated not just as a business function, but as a reflection of how people live, choose, and connect.