Yvetta Simonyan

PhD (London Business School)
HOME CV RESEARCH TEACHING

My main research focuses on consumer decision making applied to branding and charitable giving, the effect of marketing on society, and marketing ethics.

I study consumers' inferences about brand quality based on the information people have about brands in their memory. More specifically, I am interested in exploring the relative importance of different memory cues (for example, whether or not consumers recognize a brand, how often they have seen or heard of it, how much and what they know about the brand’s quality) in consumer inference making depending on the structure of the brand information in the marketing environment. For this stream of research, I use mathematical modelling to predict consumers' inferences about brand quality and confidence in those inferences.

The other major stream of my research focuses on peoples' willingness to donate to charitable causes and the factors that affect this giving. I am especially interested in the effect of the perceived physical attractiveness of the donation recipient, or the charity beauty premium (Cryder, Botti, Simonyan 2017), and the role of intuitive versus deliberative decision-making mechanisms involved in the giving/ helping behaviour critical for charitable organizations. This research is particularly important in the domains where people consider the neediness of the donation recipient as the main criteria for choosing a charitable cause, but instead donate mostly to more attractive (less needy) causes. While this effect has been often documented in the domain of animal conservation, it is also affecting the organizations assisting the most deprived population groups in the developing world.

Finally, I am very passionate about investigating the effects of marketing activities on the society. Does the marketing communication from different channels affect people’s behaviour beyond the market environment: do the incentives encouraging rational consumer decision-making affect people’s behaviour as the members of society? How do unconventional marketing offers/opportunities that are often controversial (for example, paying children to read books or giving offenders an opportunity to buy a prison cell upgrade) affect people’s perception about the world around them? What are the factors affecting the perceived suitability of these offers for the modern world from the ethical point of view?
University of Bath School of Management London Business School Trans-Atlantic Doctoral Conference