About Us

Marta Dapena-Barón manages our team and is a founding partner of our company. She is the author of Big Picture Strategy (Wiley, 2021) and Marketing Management, The Big Picture, (Wiley,2014). Marta teaches strategic marketing to executives at a variety of companies including Johnson & Johnson, GE, Ecolab, and many others in the US, Europe and Asia. She has also taught the Core Marketing class as adjunct faculty at the Johnson School of Business at Cornell University and at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan, where she has also taught Entrepreneurial Marketing and the Big Picture framework as part of the Executive Education faculty.

Marta is interested in how the use of technology can catapult the learning capacity of organizations. She has developed the Big Picture Simulation, a systems dynamics simulation, and other online learning tools to supplement and augment our in-person sessions.   Marta’s other areas of expertise include strategic planning, business metrics, the relationship between service operations and customer satisfaction and marketing research and intelligence. Before starting Big Picture Partners she worked as Vice President of Marketing for GE Capital’s US Equipment Dealer Leasing Business where she turned the marketing function into the strategic arm of the business. She has also served as a strategy consultant for McKinsey & Co., and worked in a variety of roles at ABN AMRO Bank, including being the Director of Strategy reporting to the US Chairman of Wholesale Banking and being Group Vice President, Infrastructure privatization advisory. Marta holds a Doctorate in Organizational Learning from the University of Pennsylvania-Wharton School, a MBA in finance and international business from the University of Chicago, a MS in education from the University of Pennsylvania, and a BA in Economics summa cum laude from Kenyon College

Drew Boyd is a partner at Big Picture Partners. He is also a global leader in creativity and innovation who guides teams, global businesses and governments to deliver breakthrough results. Boyd serves as the executive director of the Master of Science in Marketing program and associate professor of Marketing and Innovation at the University of Cincinnati.

Boyd spent seventeen years with Johnson & Johnson in marketing, mergers and acquisitions, and international development. He founded and directed J&J’s Marketing Mastery Program, an internal “marketing university” benchmarked by companies such as GE, P&G, Kraft, and Merck. Boyd’s focus was on raising competencies in the areas of strategic marketing, product innovation and principles of persuasion. Of particular focus was teaching employees how to systematically invent new medical products and integrate the inventions into long-range strategic plans. Boyd is an inventor himself, earning his first patent for a device that makes spine surgery easier.

Before Johnson & Johnson, Boyd spent ten years with United Airlines, gaining managerial and leadership experience in sales, marketing, and strategic planning. Boyd also served as an officer in the United States Air Force and completed distinguished tours of duty as a crew commander in the Nuclear Missile Force and a war planning officer of the Strategic Air Command.

Boyd graduated from the United States Air Force Academy with a Bachelor of Science Degree in Management Science and Operations Research. He earned an MBA from the University of Chicago.

John Branch currently teaches a variety of marketing and international business courses at the undergraduate, M.B.A., and executive levels, and serves as the Academic Director of the School’s part-time MBA programs at the University of Michigan. He has also acted as the Director of Educational Outreach at the University’s center for emerging and transitional economies.

Prior to joining Ross, Professor Branch was on the faculty of the John M. Olin School of Business at Washington University in Saint Louis (U.S.A.) for five years. He has taught at more than 40 business schools throughout world, including the École Supérieure de Commerce de Rennes in France, the Rotterdam School of Management (Netherlands), ESAN (Peru), Stockholm School of Economics in Riga (Latvia), and the Sasin Graduate Institute of Administration (Thailand). He was also a visiting scholar at Queen Elizabeth House of the University of Oxford (England) and at the J. L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management of Northwestern University (U.S.A.).

John Branch has been involved in a variety of European Union and other government-funded development projects. He has also conducted management training in, and consulted to, numerous international companies, including British American Tobacco, Anheuser-Busch, British Telecom, Cargill, Mercedes Benz, Oracle, DELL, Coca-Cola, Michelin, Ericsson, and Nestlé.

Tom Gruen is a partner at Big Picture Partners and a professor of marketing and department chair at the University of New Hampshire. Previously he was professor of marketing and department chair at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs from 2001-2011. He was on the marketing faculty of the Goizueta Business School at Emory University from 1996-2001. He holds Ph.D., MS, and MBA degrees in Marketing from Indiana University’s Kelly School of Business. Before entering the academic world, he worked as a retail trade association executive for ten years, managing advertising and publications for membership-based organizations.

Tom’s primary teaching focus is on marketing management and strategy targeted towards MBA and Executive MBA audiences. In 2010, Tom adopted The Big Picture® curriculum, and has implemented it in these classroom courses as well as in an online format. At UCCS, Tom also taught e-commerce to both MBAs. In addition to the above responsibilities, is a regular visiting lecturer at ESCP in Paris, France, and he teaches for TKK Executive Programs of Helsinki, Finland.

His research focuses on the management of customer relationships. His research has been widely published in the top journals across multiple disciplines including the Harvard Business Review, Journal of Marketing, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Journal of Retailing, Journal of Business Research, Journal of Applied Psychology, and Journal of Operations Management.

Visa Pawittranon is the business manager at The Big Picture Partners. Her wide-ranging responsibilities at the firm include managing the Big Picture simulation, coordinating educational events, and overseeing the many operational details that keep the company running and thriving. In addition to her experience at Big Picture Partners and her passion for marketing, Visa possesses a passion for Chemistry. In her spare time, Visa is busy teaching Chemistry at Washtenaw Community College, where she has been on the faculty since 2010.

Visa possesses a Masters of Science in Organic Chemistry from Eastern Michigan University and a Bachelor of Science in Chemistry from the Mahidol University in Thailand. Visa is fluent in Thai and English.