Professor Michel's major research interests are in customer-focused marketing strategy, service innovation and pricing.

At IMD, he is the director of the Executive MBA program, and he teaches in the Strategic Marketing Program, the Foundation for Leadership Program, the MBA program, and the Orchestrating Winning Performance program as well as in many partnership programs for world-leading companies.

He has written six books, eight book chapters, and more than twenty newspaper articles on these subjects, as well as many academic articles that have appeared in journals including Harvard Business Review, California Management Review and the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science. He won the Emerald Literati Award 2009 by the Journal of Service Management, the Best Paper Award at the 10th Research Seminar in Services Management 2008 in La Londe and the Best Paper Award in Marketing Strategy at the AMA Winter Educators' Conference in 2005.

Prior to joining IMD, Professor Michel was Associated Professor of Marketing at Thunderbird School of Global Management (USA), where he taught in the MBA and EMBA programs, as well as in customised corporate learning programs for European, Korean and Chinese companies. He introduced various successful teaching innovations and received several awards for excellence in teaching. He is an invited Global Faculty at the Center for Service Leadership, Arizona State University (USA). He works internationally with clients such as GE (New York), Visa Europe, Credit Suisse, Maersk, Interbrand Zintzmeyer&Lux, Concordia, Postfinance and UBS and he ran his family's hotel business as chairman of the board. He is a non-executive board member at Bossard (SIX:BOS) and a board member of GfM Gesellschaft für Marketing (Swiss Marketing Association).

Professor Michel holds an MBA and a DBA from the University of Zurich, both summa cum laude. He received the 1997 Best Dissertation Award, granted by the Swiss Society for Market and Social Research.