Sensory Marketing Lab
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PEOPLE AND RESEARCH

Sensory Marketing Lab

LAB DIRECTOR  

Aradhna Krishna 
Prof. Aradhna Krishna has conducted research in sensory marketing since 1990, and in more than fifty published articles, she has explored ways in which a product’s look, feel, taste, sound, and smell contribute to how it is perceived, and how people respond to these perceptions. Prof. Krishna organized the first academic conference on sensory marketing (in 2008), bringing together psychologists, neuroscientists, marketing academics and practitioners. 
Illustrating her research, she also edited and contributed to the book, Sensory Marketing: Research on the Sensuality of Products, in 2009. In 2013, she published another book, Customer Sense: How the 5 Senses Influence Buying Behavior, which Kirkus Reviews calls "A sophisticated, easy-handed elucidation of the practice of marketing to our senses". 
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Prof. Krishna is considered one of the 50 most productive marketing professors in the world. Harvard Business Review recently acknowledged her as "the foremost expert in the field" of sensory marketing. In recognition of her outstanding contributions to consumer psychology, she was awarded as a Fellow of the Society for Consumer Psychology, the organization’s highest honor. She has been on the Board of Directors of Northern Technology International Corporation, a consistent Forbes best 200 small company (2002-2005), and is currently on the advisory board of Dr. Maths.  Her consulting and research relationships include Best Buy, C.S.Mott Children’s Hospital at the University of Michigan, GfK, Ohrenstein & Brown, Procter & Gamble, Red Scout, Reeves & Brightwell LLC, The Futures Company, among others.  She has also served as an expert witness for Dell and Hallmark Entertainment Inc.

Prof. Krishna is currently the Dwight F. Benton Professor of Marketing at the Ross School of Business, University of Michigan. She received her Ph.D. from New York University in 1989, her MBA from the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad in 1984 and her BA in economics from Delhi University in 1979. Besides the Ross school, she has also spent time at Columbia University, New York University, the National University of Singapore and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. 

To learn more about Prof. Aradhna Krishna, see aradhnakrishna.com



LAB MEMBERS

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Luca Cian (Sensory Marketing Lab's manager)
Dualist in his name and surname: four consonants and four vowels. Dualist in his research passions: marketing and psychology. Luca is originally from Italy, where he earned his M.A. with highest distinction at the University of Trieste. There, he was named the best faculty graduate. He received his Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Verona, and the Italian Association of Psychology awarded him the Best Dissertation prize (in his division).  In 2011, the CRUI (Council of Italian University Rectors), the CNR (Italian National Research Council), and Italian Minister of Youth recognized him as one of the best young researchers in Italy. From 2012 to 2014, he was a postdoctoral scholar in marketing at the University of Michigan, Ross School of Business, working with Professor Aradhna Krishna. Currently, he is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at the University of Virginia, Darden School of Business.  
His work has been published in leading academic journals, such as Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Consumer Psychology, and Journal of Consumer Research. 

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Tamara L. Ansons
Tamara Ansons is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at Warwick Business School. Her research focuses on examining how subtle cognitive processes influence consumer behavior. Most of this work has focused on how memory is used inferentially to guide subjective judgments, and she is currently examining howmemory influences consumers’ online behavior. In addition to this focus, she also examines other unconscious influences on consumer behavior. This line of work focuses on how contextual or situational factors alter how consumers process and are influenced by information they receive. Before joining Warwick Business School, Tamara completed her PhD in Psychology at the University of Manitoba, Canada and then received a postdoctoral fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada to study the cognitive processes that guide online consumer behavior at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan.

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Nilufer Z. Aydinoglu
Nilufer Z. Aydinoglu is Assistant Professor of Marketing at Koç University, Istanbul. She received her Ph.D. degree from University of Michigan in 2007. Her research interests fall under the areas of consumer psychology and consumer behavior, and are focused on sensory marketing (food consumption, size labels, mental imagery), consumer self-perception (self-esteem advertising, self-related imagery), and branding (preference for global and local brands, brand attachment, brands as social surrogates). She has published her work in Journal of Consumer Research and Journal of Consumer Psychology. She also has two chapters in Sensory Marketing: Research on the Sensuality of Products, edited by Aradhna Krishna. Her work is cited in Time Magazine, the New York Times, and other media.

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Yann Cornil 
Yann Cornil is an 
Assistant Professor of Marketing at the University of British Columbia, Sauder School of Business. His doctoral dissertation was on sensory imagery and the relation between pleasure expectations and food quantity, under the supervision of Prof. Pierre Chandon. Yann's research on sensory perception, food choices and emotional eating appeared in leading academic journals Psychological Science and the Journal of Consumer Psychology. Before his Ph.D., Yann graduated with a Master's degree in Marketing from HEC Paris, and worked as a marketing manager in the banking industry.

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Ryan Elder
Ryan Elder is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at the Marriott School of Management at Brigham Young University. Dr. Elder researches how sensory experiences affect consumers’ cognitions and behaviors, as well as how visual cues affect persuasion. He primarily explores these areas within the context of advertising, product packaging, and product design. His research has been published in the Journal of Consumer Research, the Journal of Marketing Research, and the Journal of Consumer Psychology. Popular accounts of his work have appeared in Good Morning America, CBS This Morning, TIME, The Huffington Post, CBS Radio, and others. 

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Linda Hagen
Linda is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California. Coming from a psychology background her research examines the psychological effects of increasing consumers' behavioral involvement in handling or building their product. For instance, with Professor Krishna she investigates how actively serving one's own food instead of passively being served changes a consumer's sense of consumption responsibility and self-evaluation, and how this affects their food choices. 

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Klemens Knoferle
Klemens is an Assistant Professor at BI Norwegian Business School. He received a PhD in Marketing from the University of St. Gallen and completed his postdoctoral training under the guidance of Charles Spence at the University of Oxford. In his research, Klemens focuses on how (multi-)sensory processes and sensory aspects of products, foods, and retail environments affect consumer behaviour. Having a background in musicology, Klemens is particularly interested in the influence of sound and music, but also in visual perception and taste. His research has been published in Marketing Letters, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, and Psychonomic Bulletin and Review.

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Beatriz Pereira
She is an Assistant Professor in Marketing at the Iowa State University. She has a B.S. and a M.S. in a Business. Her Masters thesis focused on qualitative research methods in Marketing. Currently, she studies cognitive and emotional influences to consumer decision making.  
Her research focuses on communications with bilingual individuals. Specifically,  she explores how language choice influences bilinguals memory, and the down stream effects of these cognitive processes on important behaviors such as health-related assessments and decision making. Bilinguals are an understudied, but increasingly noteworthy group worldwide, and our research aims to find ways to improve communication with bilinguals in order to increase public welfare 

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Eda Sayin
Eda Sayin is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at IE Business School, Madrid. Her research interests fall under sensory marketing (effect of odors, sounds and imagery on consumer perceptions) and branding (brand symbolism, anthropomorphization, and brand attachment). Eda has published her work at the Journal of Consumer Research, International Journal of Research in Marketing and Review of Marketing Research. Her work is cited at Chicago Tribune, Vancouver Sun, and other media. Eda completed her PhD in Marketing at the Koc University. She worked with Professor Aradhna Krishna as a visiting scholar at the University of Michigan for a year during her PhD. Prior to beginning her doctoral studies, Eda worked for a global cosmetics brand as a marketing manager. 

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Tatiana Sokolova
Tatiana is a PhD candidate at HEC Paris and a visiting scholar at the Ross School of Business. She obtained her Master’s degree at the Graduate School of Management at Saint-Petersburg State University in 2009 and started her PhD in marketing at HEC Paris in 2010. In the spring semester of 2012-2013 academic year she was a visiting scholar at the Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University. 
In her dissertation research Tatiana is examining mental representations and cognitive processes that underlie mental arithmetic in the marketplace. More broadly, she is interested in consumers’ interpretation and use of numerical information that they frequently encounter in their everyday lives.

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Mathias Streicher 
Mathias Streicher is Assistant Professor at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. He holds a MBA degree from the LMU Munich where he majored in consumer psychology. He received his doctoral degree from the University of Innsbruck, and parts of his dissertation projects were nominated for the Best Paper Award of the German Market Research Association (BVM). Mathias' research investigates the link between perception and cognition. The topics evolve around haptic processing, ideomotor compatibility in consumption, and visual attention. His work has been published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology and Applied Cognitive Psychology.

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Y. Charles Zhang
Charles Zhang is an Assistant Professor in Marketing at the University of California, Riverside. His research has primarily been focused on consumer judgment and decision, with an emphasis on numerical judgment and metaphor & embodied cognition. He has published research in Journal of Consumer Research and Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, and has presented his work in several major conferences in marketing and psychology. Zhang taught undergraduate marketing management at Michigan. Before attending Michigan, he worked full-time at Young & Rubicam and eBay in China. He is a bridge player, a photographer, and he enjoys classical music as well.


LAB AFFILIATES

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Caroline Ardelet
She is a Assistant Professor of Marketing at the Paris Ouest University, France. Prior to this, she spent 3 years as an assistant professor at the Paris Dauphine University, France. Before pursuing an academic carreer, she worked for 6 years with fashion companies, such as LVMH and Jean Paul Gaultier. She was in charge of new fragrances creation, marketing and communications. Fascinated by the evocative power of scents, she decided to do a Ph.D. on the use of scents in marketing contexts. Now, her research focuses on the effect of sensory cues (i.e. musics, smells) on consumer perceptions.At the same time, she works with fine perfumery companies (i.e. Firmenich), and with perfumers creators (i.e. Emosens) to create olfactive signatures for fashion brands.

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Gwenaëlle Briand Decré 
Dr. Gwenaëlle Briand-Decré is Lecturer of Marketing, University of Angers, France. She holds degrees from University Paris Dauphine (MS, Ph.D.). Her honors include the Aguirre-Basualdo Award of "Chancellerie de Paris" (2012) and Etienne Thil conference award for the best paper with managerial contribution (2012).  
Her most recent publications and studies have concerned sensory marketing in retail and virtual environment. Her areas of interest cover how the visual and haptic senses affect consumer perception of spaces, retailers, brands and products. She is currently working on consumer biases and how these biases influence packaging evaluation and purchase decision. 

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Cindy Caldara
Dr. Cindy Caldara is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at the Institute of Technology of Grenoble, University of Grenoble Alpes (France). She passed her Ph.D. in 2010 from the University of Grenoble Alpes, and completed her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in the same university. She has been a visiting scholar at the University of Michigan in 2007-2008 where she could get into her passion for sensory marketing research. Her dissertation focused on packaging visual incongruence perception as an efficiency lever for mass consumption goods. Aside from vision, she mostly is interested in the impact olfactory and tactile inputs have on the overall consumption experience. 

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Iris Hung
Iris Hung is currently Professor of Marketing at the 
Fudan University, Shanghai. She received her PhD in Marketing from HKUST in 2008. Her research considers consumer information processing and prosocial behavior. She has published in leading marketing and social psychology journals including Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Consumer Psychology, Journal of Marketing Research, and Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. She is also an editorial review board member for the International Journal of Research in Marketing, Journal of Consumer Research, and Journal of Consumer Psychology. She was awarded the Young Scholar by the Marketing Science Institute in 2013.

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Miaolei Jia
He is a second year Ph.D. student in Marketing at the National University of Singapore. Prior to this, he received his Bachelor and Master degree in Marketing in 2010 and 2012, respectively, both from Renmin University of China. His research interests mainly fall into sensory marketing, social influences, and the interplay between sensory stimuli and social emotion. Currently, he studies the social emotion of nostalgia. Specifically, his research focuses on the influence of sensory inputs on nostalgia and the downstream effect of nostalgia on consumer decision making.


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Ji (Jill) Xiong
Ji (Jill) Xiong is a PhD candidate in the Marketing Department in NUS Business School at National University of Singapore. Before she joined NUS marketing department, she received her M.A. degree in psychology from Consumer and Advertising Psychology Department of Korea University, Seoul, and B.A. degree in Korean Culture and Language in Dalian University of Foreign Languages, China. Her research interests include 1) Affect, and Emotion Regulation, 2) Mental Imagery, 3) Consumer Satisfaction, and 4) Aesthetic Value and Experiential Value. In the sensory marketing stream of research, she is particularly interested in auditory sensory and mental imagery, and how these factors influence consumer behaviours. 

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Li Xiuping  
Li Xiuping holds a Ph.D in marketing from the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, Canada. She is currently Associate Professor of Marketing at the National University of Singapore. Dr. Li’s research focuses on consumer judgment and decision making, and she is especially interested in how sensory experience influences consumer behavior. Her work has been published in the Journal of Consumer Research, Psychological Science, Journal of Consumer Psychology, Journal of Business Research, and Marketing Letters.


Events

​The Lab recently organized the "Sensory Perception and Behavior Workshop" (Ann Arbor, July 2016). Lab members coming from USA, Canada, and Europe attended the event.

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