Nancy Puccinelli

Research interests

My research centres on consumer behaviour. My most recent research in this area focuses on the role of ‘interpersonal customisation’ or the tailoring of a communication to a customer and identifies how firms can achieve competitive advantage in the retail sector through customisation of retail promotions and employee behaviour. As part of this research I have worked in countries such as Senegal, Chile, and China.

This area of recent research can be classified into three areas:

1) My research into affect (e.g., mood and emotions) looks at the impact of affect on consumer decision-taking. This research finds that customer mood impacts tolerance for ambiguity (Braun-LaTour, Puccinelli & Mast, 2007), preference for spokespeople in an advertisement (Puccinelli, 2006), choice of retail outlets (Puccinelli, Deshpandé, and Isen, 2007) and preference for ads (Puccinelli, Wilcox, & Grewal, 2015). Surprisingly, this work finds that people in a bad mood avoid options that make them feel better and suggests that successful firms will seek to customise their offerings to match such customer attributes.

2) A second line of work looks at the effect of being able to read affect in interpersonal contexts. This research finds that customers perceive salespeople skilled at reading nonverbal cues to customer affect as offering higher quality service (Puccinelli et al., 2013).

3) In a third line of research, I consider psychological factors that drive customer retail behaviour. This research finds, for example, that men perceive retailers featuring prices in red as offering better savings than retailers offering prices in black, while women show no such effect (Puccinelli et al. 2013).

Willing to supervise PhD

I am very interested in supervising new doctoral students. My expectation would be that they have a passion for research, aspire to an academic career, and have a strong interest in consumer behaviour. I have access to a fully-funded studentship for a talented candidate. To ensure an optimal doctoral student experience, I only accept students interested in doing work very close to my areas of interest and will usually start by collaborating on an existing project.