Areas of Expertise (10)
Marketing Interventions
Consumer Variety Seeking
Consumer Research
Marketing Strategy
Customer Insight
Pricing and Promotion
Positioning
Strategic Branding
Roi for Marketing
Marketing Impact On Firm Value
Biography
Leigh McAlister, the Ed and Molly Smith Chair in Business Administration in the department of marketing at the McCombs School of Business, The University of Texas at Austin is an expert in customer decision making and marketing strategy (the use of customer insight to increase firm value by better meeting customer needs).
She is an influential researcher. Recent evidence of that influence includes her having won the 2003 Journal of Marketing Research O’Dell Award for the most impactful paper published five years earlier, the 2007 and 2011 Davidson Awards for the best paper in Journal of Retailing, and her being a finalist for the 2007 Journal of Marketing MSI/H. Paul Root Award for the paper most likely to impact practice. In 2014 she won the American Marketing Association’s Strategy Interest Group Award for Career Achievement in Strategy Research and she was named the American Marketing Association/McGraw-Hill/Irwin Distinguished Marketing Educator (the highest award given in the field of Marketing). In 2015 she was named an Inaugural Fellow in the American Marketing Association and she won the McCombs School Career Award for Outstanding Research Contributions.
McAlister’s work is published in all of the leading Marketing journals, she is an Associate Editor at Marketing Science and Journal of Marketing, she recently served as Associate Editor of Journal of Marketing Research and she is a member of the Policy Board for the Journal of Consumer Research. She served as Executive Director of the Marketing Science Institute, 2003-2005. Her work has been supported by grants from Procter &Gamble, HEB Grocery Co., 3M, Motorola, Frito-Lay, Philip Morris, Pepsi, Miller, McLane Distributing, and the Marketing Science Institute.
Media
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Videos:
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Education (3)
Stanford University: Ph.D., Decision Sciences 1978
Stanford University: M.Sc., Operations Research 1975
University of Oklahoma: Mathematics, B.A. 1972
Media Appearances (4)
Food Fight
Texas Monthly print
2016-06-01
Long before Walmart starting pushing into South Texas, H-E-B began studying the company’s success, and it adapted the productivity loop to its own business. “They anticipated Walmart’s arrival and they cut the advantage that Walmart has over every other retail chain,” says Leigh McAlister, a marketing professor at the University of Texas and co-author of Grocery Revolution: The New Focus on the Customer. “H-E-B is six steps ahead of everybody else. South Texas is the only place that Walmart hasn’t been able to just roll into and dominate.”
Research finds reason advertising boosts stock prices for some companies and not others
IU Bloomington Newsroom online
2016-01-13
By 2017, total advertising expenditures are expected to reach upwards of $136 billion. While nearly every researcher believes advertising boosts sales, beliefs are mixed regarding its effectiveness on stock price. The paper, “Advertising Effectiveness: The Moderating Effect of Firm Strategy,” with co-authors are Leigh McAlister and Raji Srinivasan, marketing professors at the McCombs School, explains cost leadership strategy firm's advertising will not improve their stock prices.
Advertising Disclosure in Public Filings: Implications for Firm Profitability, Firm Value and Top Management Team Structure
Knowledge to Go Webinar online
2013-04-16
Webinar recording and presentation slides.
The Cherry-Picker Problem
Know online
2010-02-10
“Grocery retailers believe cherry pickers exist,” McAlister said. “People report doing it, but it has been hard to tease out of the data. It’s hard to see it.”
Articles (13)
Leigh McAlister Citations
Google Scholar
Listing of top scholarly works by Leigh McAlister.
From Browsing to Buying and Beyond: The Needs-Adaptive Shopper Journey Model
Journal of the Association for Consumer Research
2018-07-01
We propose a theory-based model of the shopper journey, incorporating the rich literature in consumer and marketing research and taking into account the evolving retailing landscape characterized by significant knowledge, lifestyle, technological, and structural changes. With consumer well-being at its core and shopper needs and motivations as the focus, our needs-adaptive shopper journey model complements and contrasts with existing models.
Advertising Effectiveness: The Moderating Effect of Firm Strategy
Journal of Marketing Research
2016-04-01
In this article, the authors hypothesize that advertising influences firm value for a differentiator because advertising can elaborate the firm’s point of difference into brand equity, thereby building firm value.
How Do Consumers Respond To Storylines in Television Advertisements?
Journal of Advertising Research
2015-03-01
The current study examined consumers' moment-to-moment advertisement evaluations by applying a form of principal-components analysis that allows researchers to understand divergence in consumer response and link this divergence to specific elements of the advertisement's storyline.
Help or Hinder? When Recommendation Signage Expands Consideration Sets and Heightens Decision Difficulty
Journal of Consumer Psychology
2013-04-01
This research examines whether recommendation signage helps or hinders the consumer when faced with choosing from large product assortments.
Stock Market Reaction to Unexpected Growth in Marketing Expenditure
Journal of Marketing
2011-07-01
Because firms do not publicly report marketing expenditures, most studies of the link between firm value and marketing consider advertising (which is publicly reported for many firms) a proxy for marketing. The authors extend those studies in two ways. First, they broaden the proxy for marketing by considering both advertising and sales force. Second, they offer an explanation for the fact that some studies linking advertising to firm value find a positive relationship, whereas others find a negative relationship.
A Dynamic Model of the Effect of Online Communications on Firm Sales
Marketing Science
2011-06-01
In this paper, we look beyond ratings to a more comprehensive view of online communications. We consider the sales effect of the volume of positive, negative, and neutral online communications captured by Web crawler technology and classified by automated sentiment analysis.
Advertising, Research and Development, and Systematic Risk of the Firm
Journal of Marketing
2006-12-31
The article's findings extend prior research that has focused primarily on the effect of marketing initiatives on performance metrics without consideration of systematic risk.
Consumers' Perceptions of the Assortment Offered in a Grocery Category: The Impact of Item Reduction
Journal of Marketing Research
1997-12-31
The authors examine how consumers form assortment perceptions in the face of SKU reduction.
Promotion Signal: Proxy for a Price Cut?
Journal of Consumer Research
1989-12-31
Low need for cognition individuals react to the simple presence of a promotion signal whether or not the price of the promoted brand is reduced, but high need for cognition individuals react to a promotion signal only when it is accompanied by a substantive price reduction.
Variety Seeking Behavior: An Interdisciplinary Review
Journal of Consumer Research
1981-12-31
A taxonomy of varied behavior is offered to structure research findings pertaining to the various phenomena termed "variety seeking."
A Dynamic Attribute Satiation Model of Variety-Seeking Behavior
Journal of Consumer Research
1981-12-31
This paper presents a model of individual consumer choice for separate choice occasions.
Choosing Multiple Items from a Product Class
Journal of Consumer Research
1979-12-06
How product choices are made when there are multiple preferences. Winner of 1978 American Marketing Association Dissertation Award. Winner of 1978 Journal of Consumer Research/Association of Consumer Research Dissertation Award.
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