John Smith is a Professor of Business Administration at National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in Mexico City, Mexico. He teaches marketing, retail management, services marketing, and international marketing and has chaired the marketing department since 1991.

Dr. Smith is also the Research Director of the XYZ Research Center in Latin America. He has collaborated with a variety of companies including 3M, Osram, Bayer, Unilever, Siemens, and P&G.; Dr. Smith obtained his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston, Massachusetts. His fields of research deal with retail management and the process of shaping business models for bottom of the pyramid consumers. He created the "Smart Start for Art" retail framework, coauthored five books on marketing and retail strategy, and has written more than sixty cases and academic papers.

In 2003, Dr. Smith's article on "How to Sell Snow Cones to the Eskimos" was selected as one of the top three articles in the past five years by Harvard Business Review Latin America.