hero image
Leigh McAlister - The University of Texas at Austin, McCombs School of Business. Austin, TX, UNITED STATES

Leigh McAlister

Professor, Department of Marketing | The University of Texas at Austin, McCombs School of Business

Austin, TX, UNITED STATES

Consumer choice and behavior, marketing strategies, and brand preferences

Social

Areas of Expertise (10)

Positioning

Strategic Branding

Roi for Marketing

Marketing Impact On Firm Value

Marketing Interventions

Consumer Variety Seeking

Consumer Research

Marketing Strategy

Customer Insight

Pricing and Promotion

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

Publications:

Leigh McAlister Publication Leigh McAlister Publication Leigh McAlister Publication Leigh McAlister Publication Leigh McAlister Publication

Documents:

Photos:

Leigh McAlister Photo Leigh McAlister Photo

Videos:

Audio/Podcasts:

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.”

view more

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.

view more

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.

view more

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.”

view more

Articles (13)

Leigh McAlister Citations


Google Scholar

Listing of top scholarly works by Leigh McAlister.

view more


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.

view more


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.

view more


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.

view more


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.

view more


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.

view more


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.

view more


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.

view more


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.

view more


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.

view more


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."

view more


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.

view more


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.

view more


 Your profile is not published.

Contact