Steve Burgess is Professor of Business Administration in Marketing in the Graduate School of Business at the University of Cape Town. He came to the GSB in 2000 from the University of the Witwatersrand, where he was the Association of Marketers Professor of Marketing. He has been visiting professor of marketing at the Kenan-Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the Fisher College of Business at The Ohio State University. He also held positions of major responsibility in business as Managing Director of Autopage Cellular in the Altron Group, of ConsumaData (now part of Experian South Africa) and as a senior marketing executive at Johnson & Johnson. He was GSB Research Director from 2001-2008.

Professor Burgess is a member of the Executive Committee of the European Marketing Academy, a member of the Advisory Committee on Transformative Consumer Research for the Association of Consumer Research (USA) and a fellow of the Academy of Marketing Science (USA) and the International Trade Institute of Southern Africa. He also is a member of the Academy of Management, Academy of International Business, and the Southern African Marketing Research Association. He was one of five people chosen to represent the new South African government on its first trade mission to the United States in 1994.

Professor Burgess was early in recognising the need to assess the generalisability of marketing theories to the emergent markets context. His research focuses on the institutional characteristics of emergent markets (e.g., diversity, resources, human development, living standards, monetary attitudes, value priorities, social axioms, personality traits, subjective well-being) and the implications for successful marketing strategies (market orientation, market segmentation and positioning, brand loyalty), primarily in the consumer marketing domain. He is an active researcher whose work has been published and cited frequently in respected journals in the fields of marketing, management and psychology.

He serves as a review board member (e.g., International Journal of Advertising) or reviewer (e.g., Journal of Marketing, International Journal of Research in Marketing, Journal of International Business Studies) and has served as a conference track or session chair (e.g., Academy of Marketing Science, Association for Consumer Research). In 2007, he published his fifth book, International Marketing (with Bothma, Oxford University Press).

In 2007, Professor Burgess was recognised with the first-ever Marketing Science Institute Visiting Scholar Award by the Marketing Science Institute (Boston, USA). He is a Faculty Affiliate of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan and a Corresponding Researcher with the Centre for Marketing and Communications at Copenhagen Business School in Denmark.