Susan Broniarczyk
Associate Dean for Research and Professor, Department of Marketing | The University of Texas at Austin, McCombs School of Business
Austin, TX, UNITED STATES
Understanding consumer behavior, marketing strategies, judgment and decision making
Areas of Expertise (9)
Goal Achievement
Retailing Strategies
Consumer Choice
Consumer Behaviour
Brand Management
Product Marketing
Human Perception
Consumer Satisfaction
Decision Making
Biography
Susan M. Broniarczyk is a professor and expert in the field of consumer psychology and human behavior as it relates to important life decisions, including product choices and consumption, brand loyalty, product recommendations and advice, and gift-giving. She has also looked at how consumers make decisions about participation in retirement plans.
Broniarczyk is an acclaimed researcher and writer on brand strategy, product assortment, marketing theory and practice, retailing strategy, consumer motivations, and marketing science. Her research has been featured in the media including Time Magazine, Business Week, and U.S. News and World Report.
Broniarczyk became president of the Society for Consumer Psychology in 2014. She serves as associate editor at the Journal of Marketing Research and on the editorial boards of the Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Consumer Psychology, and Journal of Marketing. She has been active in the Association for Consumer Research serving on its advisory board, as Treasurer, and 2001 ACR conference co-chair.
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Education (2)
University of Florida: Ph.D., Marketing
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign: B.Sc. (Summa Cum Laude), Business Administration
Media Appearances (6)
Why Your BFF Gets You Terrible Gifts
IOL online
2016-05-17
This is the dilemma at the heart of a fascinating series of experiments to be published soon in the Journal of Marketing Research. According to Morgan Ward of Southern Methodist University and Susan Broniarczyk of the University of Texas at Austin, people typically cite two primary motivations in picking out gifts for others: They want to choose something the recipient will like, or they seek to “signal relational closeness with gifts that demonstrate their knowledge of the recipient.”
Choice: Giving customers too much of a good thing online
Brafton print
2014-05-02
Susan Broniarczyk, a professor of marketing at UT Austin’s McCombs School of Business, first identified the phenomenon in her 2005 paper, “The deleterious Consumers have more choices than ever before, and it's up to marketers to give them direction.effects of living in consumer hyperchoice.”
When Gift Giving Is All About the Giver
TIME online
2012-12-22
How people compensate for giving gifts that conflict with their personal views is the subject of a recent study in the Journal of Consumer Research.
Tampon Trip Proves Choice Can Be Bad
The Globe and Mail online
2010-12-27
Consumer hyperchoice is “an ever-increasing amount of buying that occurs amidst an ever-increasing amount of new products, brands and brand extensions, in the midst of an ever-increasing amount of other daily demands and an ever-decreasing amount of discretionary time.”
When Holiday Gift Giving Offends the Giver
Time online
2010-12-23
Researchers studied the behavior of two groups that adhere to a die-hard sort of tribalism — college sports fans and political junkies — after buying gifts for the other side.
Marketing Tips for 21st Century Retailers
Wharton Magazine online
2017-08-11
While gift registries serve gift recipients, some gift givers don’t like using them, especially for closer contacts, because they make it difficult to convey one’s relationship with the recipient, as marketing professor Susan Broniarczyk (University of Texas at Austin) explained.
Articles (9)
Susan M. Broniarczyk Citations
Google Scholar
Listing of top scholarly works by Susan M. Broniarczyk.
Ask and You Shall (Not) Receive: Close Friends Prioritize Relational Signaling over Recipient Preferences in Their Gift Choices
Journal of Marketing Research
2016-12-01
Gift givers balance their goal to please recipients with gifts that match recipient preferences against their own goal to signal relational closeness with gifts that demonstrate their knowledge of the recipient. Five studies in a gift registry context show that when close (vs. distant) givers receive attribution for the gifts they choose, they are more likely to diverge from the registry to choose items that signal their close relationships.
From Close to Distant: The Dynamics of Interpersonal Relationships in Shared Goal Pursuit
Journal of Consumer Research
2015-02-01
This research examines how individuals’ relationship with others sharing the pursuit of the same individual goal may change from early to later stages of the pursuit
Decision Difficulty in the Age of Consumer Empowerment
Journal of Consumer Psychology
2014-10-01
We examine the impact of two key factors of consumer empowerment - choice freedom and expansion of information - on the choice difficulty consumers experience in today’s decision environment.
Investing for Retirement: The Moderating Effect of Fund Assortment Size on the 1/N Heuristic
Journal of Marketing Research
2012-08-01
The authors explore investors’ tendency to engage in the 1/n heuristic— that is, allocating their dollars evenly across all available investment options.
Factors Influencing the Likelihood of Customer Defection: The Role of Consumer Knowledge
Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science
2002-12-31
This article suggests that for repurchase decisions that involve an information-based evaluation of alternatives to the incumbent, likelihood of defection will be influenced by “how much” customers know about those alternatives.
Consumers' Perceptions of the Assortment Offered In a Grocery Category: The Impact of Item Reduction
Journal of Marketing Research
1997-12-31
How consumers form assortment perceptions in the face of SKU reduction with a particular emphasis on the availability of a favorite product and the amount of shelf space devoted to the category.
The Importance of the Brand in Brand Extension
Journal of Marketing Research
1993-12-31
Brand-specific associations may dominate the effects of brand affect and category similarity, particularly when consumer knowledge of the brands is high.
The Role of Consumers' Intuitions in Inference Making
Journal of Consumer Research
1993-12-31
Intuitive beliefs about the relationships between attributes are perceived as a particularly reliable basis for inter-attribute inference.
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