Aparna Labroo
Professor of Marketing at Kellogg School of Management
Schools
- Kellogg School of Management
Expertise
Links
Biography
Kellogg School of Management
Dr. Labroo is a Consumer Psychologist who joined Kellogg as Professor of Marketing in 2013. Her research investigates how people can be nudged into taking actions beneficial to them and to society in the long run. In particular, her expertise is in understanding how people's feelings impact such judgments and decision-making, including their consumer choices, persuasion, health-regulation, self-control, pro-social action, and creativity. Her research has featured in New York Times, Time, MSN, Forbes, Financial Times, Business Week, Scientific American, and other leading media outlets and she has presented this research a several leading business schools and psychology departments worldwide. She is recipient of the Society for Consumer Psychology Early Career Award, is currently is an Associate Editor for Journal of Consumer Research and serves on the editorial board of several journals, including the Journal of Consumer Psychology and the Journal of Marketing Research.
Before joining Kellogg, Dr. Labroo served as the Patricia C. Ellison Professor of Marketing at University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management, and as Assistant and then Associate Professor of Marketing at Chicago Booth, where she taught MBA and Executive Courses on Marketing Strategy and on Strategic Brand Communications. She previously worked in advertising, on Unilever and SmithKline Beecham Brands. She has an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management (Ahmedabad) and her PhD is from Cornell.
Research Interests
My research investigates how feelings influence judgment and decision making, including consumer choices, self-control choices that involve trade-offs between immediate pleasure and long-term benefits, self-regulation and healthy choices, pro-social actions including charitable giving, creativity and cognitive performance. In these contexts, I investigate how feelings (incidental feelings that arise outside of the decision process, feelings that arise from the decision process itself, or sensory-motor physiological experiences) play a functional role in helping people accomplish their goals.
Education
- PhD, 2004, Marketing, Cornell University
- BA, Economics, St. Stephen's College, India, Honors
- MBA, Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad
Academic Positions
- Professor of Marketing, Northwestern University, 2013-present
- Patricia C. Ellison Professor of Marketing, University of Toronto, 2011-2013
- Visiting Scholar, Northwestern University, 2011-2012
- Visiting Professor of Marketing, University of Chicago, Fall 2011, 2011-2011
- Associate Professor of Marketing, University of Chicago, 2007-2011
- Assistant Professor of Marketing, University of Chicago, 2003-2007
Awards
- Conference Co-chair, NASMEI
- Executive MBA Program Outstanding Teaching Award (Cohort 118), Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management
- OpEd Project Public Voices Fellow, Northwestern University, 2015-16
- Conference Co-chair, Association for Consumer Research Annual Conference
Editorial Positions
- Co-Editor, Marketing Letters, 2021
- Co-Editor, Special Issue of the Journal of Consumer Psychology, 2018-2021
- Co-Editor, Journal of Association for Consumer Research (Special Issue), 2018-2020
- Editorial Review Board Member, Journal of Consumer Psychology, 2015
- Associate Editor, Journal of Consumer Research, 2014-2018
- Associate Editor, Journal of Consumer Psychology, 2012-2015
- Editorial Review Board Member, Frontiers in Emotion Science, 2012
- Editorial Board, Journal of Marketing Research, 2006-2018
Read about executive education
Cases
Labroo, Aparna and Sara Kim. 2009. The "instrumentality" heuristic: Why metacognitive difficulty is desirable during goal pursuit. Psychological Science. 20(1): 127-134.
The literature overwhelmingly demonstrates that feelings of ease are good and that objects that are easy to process are much liked. We propose, and demonstrate across three experiments, that this is not the case when people are pursuing a goal. This is because people pursuing a goal usually invest efforts in whichever means (e.g., donate to a particular charity) they perceive as most instrumental for attaining their goal. Consequently, in their minds there is a correspondence between instrumentality of a means and feelings of effort. This correspondence becomes reversed in people’s minds during goal pursuit, and they also come to view an object that is associated with feelings of effort rather than ease as more instrumental for goal attainment and consequently more desirable. When an object is not a means to an accessible goal, or when goals relating to the means are not accessible, subjective feelings of ease improve evaluation, as found in previous research on ease of processing.
Labroo, Aparna, Soraya Lambotte and Yan Zhang. 2009. The "name-ease" effect and its dual impact on importance judgments. Psychological Science. 20(12): 1516-1522.
We demonstrate that merely naming a research finding elicits feelings of ease (a “name-ease” effect). These feelings of ease can reduce or enhance the finding’s perceived importance depending on whether people are making inferences about how understandable or how memorable the finding is. When people assess their understanding of a finding, feelings of ease reduce the finding’s perceived importance. This is because people usually invest effort to understand important information but also mistakenly infer the reverse namely, that information that requires effort to be understood is important. In contrast, when people assess the memorability of a finding, feelings of ease increase the finding’s perceived importance. Because people usually recall important information easily, in this case they equate ease with importance. Psychological effects, economic principles, math theorems, jury cases, and decisions to fund medical research can all show these effects.
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