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Research Interests

We have expertise in four main sub-fields of marketing: Social Marketing/Ethical Consumption; Marketing Communications/Social Media; International Marketing Management; and Consumer Behaviour.

A brief summary of each of these research areas is presented below:

Social Marketing/Ethical Consumption

  • Diana Gregory-Smith is interested in research about decision making in ethical consumption, with a particular focus on the attitude-behaviour gap and the influence of affect in ethical/unethical choices.
  • Dr Manika is currently conducting research on how consumers' prior knowledge influences their health-related behaviors and how to create effective public health messages that raise awareness and motivate consumers to make informed decisions on health-related issues. Dr Manika is also a Fellow of the Wolfson Research Institute, which promotes research that seeks to improve health and the quality of people's lives by informing policy and practice.
  • Dr Wells is involved in research exploring a number of aspects of consumer and employee ethical and pro- and anti-environmental behavior and has also done some work on boycotting. This has included exploring the responsibility orientations of consumer to their behavior regarding climate change and work applying behavioral psychology to environmental choices. She is currently involved in projects exploring attitudes towards renewable technology investment, the strategic marketing of biofuels, SME energy use and consumer value in relation to fuel value amongst others.

  • Dr Xiao's research activities relate to social marketing, particularly health marketing, and are focused primarily on behavioural interventions. There are three specific streams to her research at present. Firstly, she has been working on the behavioural analysis of impulse buying for two years now, the primary objectives being to better understand impulse buying behaviours, to intervene and control those behaviours, and to promote well-being. Secondly, she is now investigating the role of assistive technologies in the care of the elderly, with special emphasis on the potential of everyday consumer technology products (e.g. iPad) rather than specialist telecare ones. Finally, she has also begun to develop a stream of research under the general heading of cause-related marketing.

Marketing Communications/Social Media

  • Diana Gregory-Smith's research interests are related to the role of emotions in marketing communications within several areas such as social marketing, ethical consumption and tourism products.
  • Dr Manika is currently conducting research regarding the effectiveness of marketing communication messages (mostly health-related) via both traditional and non-traditional media outlets in influencing consumer decision-making and changing/forming consumer attitudes and behaviors.
  • Dr Tiwsakul's research interests include product placement, promotional ethics and regulation, advertising, branding and experiential consumption, consumer culture theory (CCT), and identity. She is interested in accessing and theorising consumer experience with particular regard to how consumption (of brands, experiences, and media) inflects consumers' senses of identity and meaning.
  • Dr Hardey's work focuses on in-depth research about consumer behaviour and the commercial opportunities that are emerging through social media. A particular aspect of Dr Hardey's work is her collaboration with organisations both within and outside of academia. She is currently involved with several companies where her work informs and shapes future innovations around consumer-generated content.

International Marketing Management

  • Dr Sousa work focuses on globalization, international marketing strategies, export marketing, and entry strategies in foreign markets. His current research focuses on the determinants of export performance and cultural influences on international marketing strategies and performance.
  • Dr Ellis's research explores the management of inter-organizational relationships in B2B marketing, supply chains and professional services. A key part of this work involves the study of marketing practice in terms of how marketing managers in different cultural contexts make sense of their worlds and how they construct their identities. His broadly interpretive approach embraces marketing and organization studies, with an emphasis on critical perspectives underpinned by discourse analysis.

Consumer Behaviour

  • Dr Huang interests in symbolic consumption. She investigates consumers' interpretations of brands and advertisements. Her research involves consumers' conscious interpretations of brands (including brand personality, brand relationship, and brand community) and advertisements (including gender perceptions) as well as nonconscious interpretations (implicit emotion) through packaging designs and brand usage.
  • Dr Manika is involved in various aspects of consumer behaviour research (mostly with a quantitative application on health-related topics). Her research involves the effect of consumer-related factors such as prior knowledge, trust, attitudes and perceptions, among other consumer-related factors, in influencing information-seeking and purchase behaviors. Dr Manika is also interested in how advertisements (and more specifically public health messages and pharmaceutical advertising) influence consumer behaviour.
  • Dr Taheri's research focuses on the role of the active consumer in leisure society, tourist/visitor experience, consumer engagement, identity, tourism/heritage marketing, postmodern consumption and experiential marketing.
  • Dr Well's interests in consumer behaviour cover a range of subject areas, She works in the application of behavioural economics, via matching, and ecology, via foraging behaviour, to consumer retail and brand choice situations. She also looks at students as educational consumers and how there are affected by their educational environments or eduscapes (based on the servicescape model).
  • Dr Xiao's research area is in consumer behaviour analysis, the measurement of behavioural change in response to marketing interventions, adoption of innovations, the development of technology brands, and the role of social networks within a health and social care context. She has also conducted major work in the area of intellectual property rights, particularly IPR infringement, and in the development of anti-counterfeiting strategies. Her methodological skills lie in qualitative focus group design and facilitation, together with quantitative techniques such as structural equation modelling, data mining and applied behaviour analysis.

  • Dr Yan's research focuses on consumer behaviour in fields such as marketing (e.g. exploring brands’ price elasticity, observing consumers’ buying patterns in terms of different purchase situations); behavioural economics (e.g. testing the application of various behavioural economic models in order to explain consumer behaviour, examining the impact of brand-related characteristics in demand models); behavioural psychology (e.g. scaling the substitutability of brand groups via matching); microeconomics (e.g. investigating consumption patterns across life-cycle stages via price index).  

For more specific information on any of the above, please visit individual staff web pages.