Date: Friday November 23, 2012
Time: 10:30am-Noon
Location: 2C17 (the Arts building)
Speaker: Dr. Tobias Schroeder
Topics: Models of Emotion and their Relevance to Marketing

Emotions clearly matter to Marketing. We cannot understand phenomena like branding, consumer decision-making, persuasion, or even technology adoption, without understanding the emotional mechanisms that underly human communication and decision-making. In multiple disciplines, research on emotion has flourished over the past decade, increasing our knowledge about what emotions are, how they can be modeled, and how they influence behaviour. I will review some of the main developments in the affective
sciences, make some suggestions about how to possibly integrate complex findings across multiple levels of explanation (neural, cognitive, social, cultural), and discuss some current studies that apply models of emotion to challenges in Marketing. In particular, I will describe (1) the development of an agent-based computer model of innovation diffusion, which is based on theories of emotional decision-making; (2) the conceptualization of brands as culturally shared affective representations; and (3) new ideas regarding the role of affective identity for persuasion.