Dr. Levy is the Coca-Cola Distinguished Professor of Marketing and Special Assistant to the Head of the Department of Marketing, College of Business and Public Administration, University of Arizona. He earned his Ph.D. from the Committee on Human Development, University of Chicago. He was licensed as a psychologist in the State of Illinois. He joined the faculty of the School of Business, Northwestern University in 1961 and taught there for 36 years. He was chairman of the Kellogg School department of marketing from 1980 to 1992. He is the Charles H. Kellstadt Emeritus Professor of Marketing. In 1988, he was named AMA/Irwin Distinguished Marketing Educator. In 1982 he was honored as a Fellow by the Association for Consumer Research and named a life member. In 1997, HEC-University of Montreal named him first recipient of a Living Legend of Marketing award. He was elected president of the Association for Consumer Research for 1991. In May, 2000, he received the Converse Award for his contributions to marketing including especially the enduring influence of his 1959 article “Symbols for Sale.”

His articles have been widely anthologized; those of special interest to marketers include "The Product and the Brand," "Symbols for Sale," "Social Class and Consumer Behavior," and "Broadening the Concept of Marketing." For the latter, he and Philip Kotler received the Alpha Kappa Sigma award for best article in the Journal of Marketing. "In­ter­preting Consumer Mythology" received the Maynard Award for the best theoretical article in the Journal of Marketing in 1981. Dr. Levy wrote (with Ira O. Glick) Living with Television (Aldine, 1962); Promotion: A Behavioral View (Prentice-Hall, 1967; reissued 2005); Promotional Behavior (Scott, Foresman, 1971); Marketing, Society, and Conflict (with Gerald Zaltman) (Prentice-Hall, 1975); Marketplace Behavior -- Its Meaning for Management (AMA/COM, 1978); and (with Deborah D Heisley) “Autodriving: A Photoelicitation Technique (Journal of Consumer Research, 1991). More recent articles include "Stalking the Amphisbaena," Journal of Consumer Research, (Dec. 1996), and “Household Policies: A Converse Idea,” 15th Paul D. Converse Symposium, (AMA, 2001). In 1999, Sage published a collection of his work entitled Brands, Consumers, Symbols, and Research: Sidney J. Levy on Marketing. In November, 2000, he was honored at a conference sponsored by the Department of Sociology of the University of Chicago; he delivered a paper titled “Roots of Marketing and Consumer Research at the University of Chicago” (CMC, June 2003). Recent articles: “Revisiting the Marketing Domain,” appeared in the European Journal of Marketing, Vol. 36, No. 3, 2002; “The Evolution of Qualitative Research in Marketing,” Journal of Business Research, Special Issue, Vol. 58, March, 2005, 341-347; “How New, How Dominant,” Lusch, Robert F., and Stephen L. Vargo, eds., The Service-Dominant Logic of Marketing, M.E. Sharpe, 2006; “History of Qualitative Research Methods in Marketing,” and “The Consumption of Stories,” both in Belk, Russell, ed., Handbook of Qualitative Research Methods in Marketing,” Edward Elgar, 2006.