Understanding the World We Buy Into
What I Study
Financial Well-being
What does it mean to be “financially healthy?” I study how banks, employers, and financial companies shape the way people think about money, and what that means for consumers trying to get by.
Marketplace Inclusion
Who gets to thrive in markets and why? My research examines how historical policies and everyday market design effects consumers that are historically overlooked.
Brand Strategy
Brands work hard to connect with consumers. I study what happens when brand strategies don’t land the way firms expect, and why consumer responses to brand communications are shaped by more than the message itself.
Featured Research
How Financial Companies Redefined What It Means to Struggle Financially
After the 2008 financial crisis, Americans lost confidence in banks and financial institutions, and that confidence never fully returned. Nearly half of U.S. households now use nonbank platforms to manage their money, and by 2025 trust in banks sat lower than it did before the crisis. The industry responded, but not in the way you might expect.
The industry noticed.
Instead of changing fees, credit scoring, or how products are designed, financial organizations built something new: financial wellness programs. Money coaches. Emotional spending assessments. Apps designed to improve your relationship with money. What began as financial education gradually turned into something closer to therapy, treating money problems as a matter of mindset, anxiety, and personal history.
My research asks where this shift came from and what it accomplishes.
My research follows this shift across the financial services field, drawing on interviews with the people who design these programs, deliver them, and live with them.
Published Research
When Brand Narratives are Written in Metaphoric Terms, Can They Weaken Self–Brand Connections?
Journal of the Association for Consumer Research, 2024
Previous research has established that brand narratives can strengthen the connection between consumers and brands. The present investigation raises the question of whether this finding holds when narratives are written in metaphoric terms. Three studies, including a pilot study of Amazon.com brand reviews (𝑁=1,000) and two experiments (𝑁=4,017), illustrate that metaphoric (vs. nonmetaphoric) narratives can actually weaken the self-brand connection. The studies illuminate that, while metaphoric narratives are prevalent in consumer reviews, such reviews seem less likely to provide the narrative structure necessary to establish a strong connection with the brand. This work contributes to the novel insight that while consumers often use metaphors as a way to talk about brands, relying on metaphors may actually weaken the review writer’s connection with the brand. This effect remains robust even when considering high levels of brand familiarity and linguistic abilities of the brand review writer.
Is laughter the best marketing? Why this is the wrong question
Current Opinion in Psychology, 2023
Humor is often described as a miracle pill for marketers, yet the effects of humor on advertising, content marketing, service, and other marketing functions are wildly inconsistent. Before scholars can know whether a pun, prank, meme, or laugh will attract sales, clicks, or five-star reviews, they need to understand why the effects of humor appear to vary. Humor has different effects because scholars have treated humor as different constructs while studying how it influences different marketing outcomes with different types of stimuli in different of situations on different types of people. Only by recognizing these differences can scholars begin to understand when, why, and how humor can benefit marketers. To navigate this complexity, researchers need to develop a theory of humor that can help explain how different attempts to be humorous influence different consumers in different situations.