Marketing at Leeds
The Marketing Division in the Leeds School of Business brings together a globally recognized community of scholars and educators dedicated to advancing the understanding of consumer behavior and shaping the future of markets.Ìý
The division’s faculty are distinguished for their high-impact research across areas such as behavioral science, customer analytics, financial well-being, marketplace ethics, and emerging technologies. This work—spanning topics from consumer decision-making and data-driven strategy to privacy and innovation—positions the division at the forefront of both disciplinary and interdisciplinary advancement, with insights that inform business practice as well as public policy.ÌýÌý
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In the classroom, faculty translate cutting-edge research into engaging, applied learning experiences that emphasize analytical rigor, creativity, and real-world relevance. Students benefit from a dynamic curriculum that integrates foundational marketing principles with evolving tools such as AI, data analytics, and digital platforms, alongside experiential opportunities that build practical skills and professional readiness. With robust undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral programs, the division equips students to navigate an increasingly complex, data-rich, and customer-centric business environment—preparing them to lead with insight, adaptability, and impact.
Research Themes
Financial Well-Being
Behavioral Science/Consumer Psychology
Big Data, Machine Learning and Customer Analytics
Marketplace Ethics and Privacy
Emerging Technology and Innovation
Managerial Bias
Customer Experience
16
Tenure/Tenure Track-Faculty
Salim Family Endowed Esteemed Professor
Chair of the Marketing Division
Why do some investors overestimate their ability to beat the market?Ìý
Leeds School of Business Professor Phil Fernbach explores how biased memory and "selective forgetting" fuel overconfidence, leading to costly mistakes. Learn how investors can recalibrate and make smarter decisions.Ìý
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Advances in Consumer Research
Quentin André
July 2025
Noise in the Process: A Meta-Analysis of Mediation Effects in Marketing Journals Aaron Charlton, College of Business, Illinois State University, USA Amanda Montoya, Department of Psychology, University of California Los Angeles, USA John Price, WU, Vienna University of Economics and Business, Austria Joe Hilgard, College of Arts and Sciences, Illinois State University, USA Paper #2: The same year, Simonsohn, Simmons and Nelson's "False-Positive Psychology" (2011) showed that common practices in behavioral research (e.g., not reporting all conditions and measures, or deciding when to stop data collection) allowed researchers to provide significant evidence for impossible results (e.g., that listening to "When I'm 64" by The Beatles can lower people's age by more than a year). Like the afore-mentioned meta-analyses, the current research examines the average power of mediation tests through analysis of reported statistics-specifically confidence intervals from mediation tests. To simulate true effects, we created a series of 3-variable datasets with a weak population-level indirect effect (ß=.O4) that fully mediated the relationship between X and Y. We settled on ß=.O4 because it allowed us to achieve desired power levels using sample sizes that are similar to those reported in marketing journals.Ìý
Journal of Marketing Research
Phil Fernbach
Additional Author: Nicholas Light
Dec 2024, Vol. 61 Issue 6, p1152-1170
Evoking simplicity in marketing communications has become popular among marketing practitioners, but little is known about its effects on consumers and firms. The current work focuses on consumers' perceptions of the simplicity or complexity of brands and a previously overlooked consequence of those perceptions. Results from six experiments and analysis of a proprietary customer satisfaction dataset from Consumer Reports (N = 147,600) show that when consumers think brands are simple, they judge them to be less likely to experience product or service failures. Although these lower risk judgments could be positive for brands, they can also lead consumers to punish simpler brands more in the event of failures. Results also suggest that consumers' simplicity/complexity perceptions reflect the dimensionality of their mental representations of brands, and the relationship between simplicity and lower risk is attenuated when additional brand dimensionality is framed in terms of redundancy. The findings cast doubt on the degree to which evoking simplicity is a uniformly positive marketing strategy and encourage practitioners to more thoughtfully consider simplicity's implications for consumer and firm welfare.
Journal of Public Policy & Marketing
David Dobolyi, John Lynch
Additional Authors: Richard Netemeyer, Donald Lichtenstein
Oct 2024, Vol. 43 Issue 4, p254-275
How does financial education lead to improved financial behavior and higher financial well-being? An influential Consumer Financial Protection Bureau model introduced in 2015 proposes that the goal of financial education is to improve financial well-being and that financial education does so by increasing financial knowledge, which improves financial behavior, which improves financial well-being. In this study, the authors test links in the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau model, examining the differential roles of objective and subjective knowledge. They also test whether an analogous model might capture effects of physical health education on physical health knowledge, behavior, and well-being. They report a quasi-experiment comparing changes in financial and physical health knowledge, behavior, and well-being at two time points in a semester for students enrolled in a personal finance class, a personal health class, or neither. This study reports the first causal estimates of flow from financial education to financial knowledge to financial behaviors to a validated measure of subjective financial well-being. Financial education caused large changes in both objective and subjective knowledge. Yet only subjective knowledge mediated the large effects of financial education on changes in downstream behaviors. The authors find weaker but similar results for physical health. The findings suggest that financial education efforts should be refocused to foster subjective knowledge and improved behavior.ÌýÌýÌýÌý
Journal of Consumer Research
Alixandra Barasch
Additional Author: Jackie Silverman
Apr2023, Vol. 49 Issue 6, p1095-1117
New technologies increasingly enable consumers to track their behaviors over time, making them more aware of their "streaks"—behaviors performed consecutively three or more times—than ever before. Our research explores how these logged streaks affect consumers' decisions to engage in the same behavior subsequently. In seven studies, we find that intact streaks highlighted via behavioral logs increase consumers' subsequent engagement in that behavior, relative to when broken streaks are highlighted. Importantly, this effect is independent of actual past behavior and depends solely on how that behavior is represented within the log. This is because consumers consider maintaining a logged streak to be a meaningful goal in and of itself. In line with this theory, the effect of intact (vs. broken) logged streaks is amplified when consumers attribute a break in the streak to themselves rather than to external factors, and attenuated when consumers can "repair" a broken streak. Our research provides actionable insights for companies seeking to benefit from highlighting consumers' streaks in various consequential domains (e.g. fitness, learning) without incurring a cost (e.g. reduced engagement or abandonment) when those streaks are broken.ÌýÌýÌýÌý
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Center for Research on Consumer Financial Decision Making
- Annual CFDM Conference: The world’s premier academic conference dedicated to consumer financial decision-making. The annual event convenes top scholars, policymakers, and behavioral scientists from leading global institutions to present groundbreaking empirical research, evaluate emerging theoretical models, and address high-stakes household financial behaviors.
- Brown Bag Seminar Series: A regular interdisciplinary forum hosted by CFDM that brings together faculty, visiting scholars, and PhD candidates to present working papers, receive cross-disciplinary feedback on early-stage research, and foster collaborative dialogue.
- Behavioral & Methodological Pedagogy: Supporting continuous scholarly development by integrating behavioral economics, psychological insights, and empirical decision-making frameworks into doctoral training, advanced academic curricula, and faculty research methodologies.
Leeds remains committed to advance the understanding of consumer financial decision-making through cutting-edge research, fostering dialogue among experts and serving as a hub for the global academic community in this critical field.