Professor Aparna Labroo is the Patricia C. Ellison Chair and Professor of Marketing at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto and is Visiting Scholar at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University. She is visiting Booth during the Fall Quarter to teach courses in Marketing Strategy. Professor Labroo’s research interests lie in the area of consumer decision making and subjective wellbeing. Her research focus is on the roles that feelings play in such decisions. In particular, she investigates (a) how feelings (either situation-evoked feelings that arise outside the decision process or feelings that arise from the decision process) impact choices consumers make; (b) how feelings, positive and negative, can be used by consumers to accomplish higher order goals, especially for self regulation and self control; and (c) how consumers can regulate their feelings to motivate themselves and achieve important life objectives. She has published numerous articles on these topics, including several articles in the Journal of Consumer Research, the Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Motivation and Emotion, Psychological Science. Her articles include "The ‘Instrumentality’ Heuristic: Why Metacognitive Difficulty is Desirable During Goal Pursuit," written with S. Kim and published in Psychological Science (2009); "Half the Thrill is in the Chase: Twisted Inferences from Embodied Cognitions and Brand Evaluation," written with J. Nielsen and published in the Journal of Consumer Research (2010) ; "The ‘Orientation-Matching’ Hypothesis: An Emotion Specificity Approach to Affect Regulation," written with D. Rucker and published in the Journal of Marketing Research (2010); "Between two brands: A goal fluency account of brand evaluation" written with A.Y. Lee and published in the Journal of Marketing Research (2006); and "An Influence of Product and Brand Name on Positive Affect: Implicit and Explicit Measures" published in Motivation and Emotion (2004).
Labroo is recipient of the Society for Consumer Psychology’s prestigious Early Career Award (2009) , and in 2007, Labroo was selected as Marketing Science Institute's Young Scholar. Her research has earned her a Kilts Center Fellowship at the University of Chicago. She also has been named a Beatrice Foods Scholar. She advises several PhD candidates, she is part of the Editorial Review Board of the Journal of Consumer Research and at the Journal of Marketing Research, and working as an ad hoc reviewer for numerous journals, and serving as a reviewer for a handful of organizations and competitions.
Prior to joining Chicago Booth, Labroo worked as an account manager at Hindustan Thompson Associates, the division of advertising agency J. Walter Thompson in India, and as a business development manager for the British Council.
Labroo completed her undergraduate coursework at St. Stephen's College in India, where she received a bachelor's degree in economics. She also received an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad before moving to the United States and PhD in 2004 in marketing from Cornell University. During that time she was awarded a Cornell Fellowship and nominated to the AMA Doctoral Consortium. She was faculty at Booth from Fall 2003 until summer 2011.
Selected Publications
With D. Rucker, “The ‘Orientation-Matching’ Hypothesis: An Emotion Specificity Approach to Affect Regulation,” Journal of Marketing Research (2010).
With J. Nielsen, “Half the Thrill is in the Chase: Twisted Inferences from Embodied Cognitions and Brand Evaluation,” Journal of Consumer Research (2010).
With S. Kim, “The ‘Instrumentality’ Heuristic: Why Metacognitive Difficulty is Desirable During Goal Pursuit,” Psychological Science (2009).
With R. Dhar and N. Schwarz, "Of Frog Wines and Frowning Faces: Semantic Priming, Perceptual Fluency, and Brand Evaluation," Journal of Consumer Research (2008).
With A.Y. Lee, "Between Two Brands: A Goal Fluency Account of Brand Evaluation," Journal of Marketing Research (2006).
