Kelly Herd

Education

• Ph.D., University of Colorado at Boulder
• B.S., Washington and Lee University

Areas of Expertise

• Product Design
• Creativity
• Emotions

Marketing professor Kelly Herd’s research focuses primarily on creativity and product design as they relate to a variety of topics including social cognition, identity, and emotions. She is particularly interested in what motivates consumers to engage in aesthetic product design and how companies can better enable individuals to develop unique and effective solutions to fulfill their own needs and wants (e.g., customization) as well as those of the marketplace (e.g., crowdsourcing). Her research has been published in the Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing, and Journal of Consumer Psychology. She won both the 2019 UConn School of Business Innovation in Teaching Award and the 2021 UConn AAUP Innovation in Teaching Award.

Professor Herd holds a Ph.D. in Marketing from the University of Colorado. Prior to completing her Ph.D., she specialized in public relations and consumer research, developing marketing campaigns for clients including Toshiba, Disney, NBC, and Pepsi.

Featured Publications

• Herd, Kelly B., Girish Mallapragada, and Vishal Narayan (Forthcoming), “Do Backer Affiliations Help or Hurt Crowdfunding Success?,” Journal of Marketing. (Equal authorship)
• Herd, Kelly B. and Ravi Mehta (2019), “Head vs. Heart: The Effect of Objective versus Feelings-Based Mental Imagery on New Product Creativity,” Journal of Consumer Research, 46 (1), 36-52. (Equal authorship)
• Krishna, Aradhna, Kelly B. Herd, and Nilufer Z. Aydınoğlu (2019), “A Review of Consumer Embarrassment as a Public and Private Emotion,” Journal of Consumer Psychology, 29 (3), 492-516. (Equal authorship)
• Xu, Lidan, Ravi Mehta, and Kelly B. Herd (2019), “Look at Me! Or Don’t…: How Mere Social Presence Impacts Innovation Adoption,” Journal of the Association for Consumer Research, 4 (3), 269-79.
• Krishna, Aradhna, Kelly B. Herd, and Nilufer Z. Aydınoğlu (2015), “Wetting the Bed at Twenty-one: Embarrassment as a Private Emotion,” Journal of Consumer Psychology, 25 (3), 473-486. (Equal authorship).
• Moreau, C. Page, Leff Bonney and Kelly B. Herd (2011), “It’s the Thought (and the Effort) That Counts: How Customizing for Others Differs from Customizing for Oneself,” Journal of Marketing, 75 (September), 120-133.
• Moreau, C. Page, and Kelly B. Herd (2010), “To Each His Own? How Comparisons with Others Influence Consumers’ Evaluations of Their Self-Designed Products,” Journal of Consumer Research, 36 (February), 806-819.