Laura Oswald
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Laura Oswald, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of Advertising and Consumer Behavior at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana and director of Marketing Semiotics Inc. Dr. Oswald is an expert in the areas of brand strategy, consumer research, and semiotics – a branch of anthropology devoted to understanding the ways signs and symbols shape culture. In her teaching, academic research and consulting practice Dr. Oswald applies semiotics to a spectrum of research modalities, including the SignScape analysis of cultural trends, the BrandScape mapping the competitive field, and the MindScape analysis of consumer behavior, derived from depth interviews and on-site ethnographies in North America, Europe and the Far East. Her academic research and consulting practice encompass a variety of application areas, including automotive, cosmetics, food, entertainment, electronics, retailing, health care, corporate culture and public policy. Dr. Oswald also has extensive research and teaching experience in the international arena, having taught in the MBA programs at Nanyang Business School in Singapore and at the ESSEC Business School in Paris, France. She has published scholarly research in books and journals including the Journal of Consumer Research, Poetics Today, Semiotica, and Advances in Consumer Research, on current issues in semiotic theory, cross-cultural consumer behavior, advertising effects, and brand strategy. Dr. Oswald is currently conducting research on cross-cultural attitudes and behaviors in the luxury category, interviewing affluent consumers in Chicago, New York, Paris and Shanghai.
Recent publications on Brand Semiotics
- “The Semiotic Paradigm in Consumer Research,” with David Glen Mick, for theHandbook of Qualitative Research Methods in Marketing, ed. Russell Belk, (Forthcoming).
- “Semiotics and Ethnography: Leveraging Research to Build Brand Strategy and Advertising for the African American Segment,” in Proceedings from the Annual Conference of the Advertising Research Foundation, 2006.
- “Videographia: Video Ethnography and Postmodern Consumer Research,” Advances in Consumer Research, Volume 30, 2003.
- “Branding the American Family: A Strategic Study of the Culture, Composition and Consumer Behavior of Families in the New Millennium,” Journal of Popular Culture. Vol. 73, No. 2, November 2003.
- “Branding China: Interviews with Women in Shanghai,” Columbia University Global Brand Leadership Newsletter, March 2002.
- “Culture Swapping: the Ethnogenesis of Middle Class Haitian-American Immigrants,” in Journal of Consumer Research, Vol. 25, March 1999, pp. 303-318.
- “The Place and Space of Consumption in a Material World,” in Design Issues. Spring, 1996, pp. 48-62.