Aradhna Krishna

Aradhna Krishna is an American academic focused on marketing. She is considered one of the 50 most productive marketing professors in the world. Harvard Business Review recently acknowledged her as "the foremost expert in the field" of sensory marketing. She is the Dwight F. Benton Professor of Marketing at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan. She was awarded as a Fellow of the Society for Consumer Psychology, the organization’s highest honor, in recognition of her contributions to consumer psychology.

Aradhna Krishna organized the first academic conference on sensory marketing (in 2008), bringing together psychologists, neuroscientists, marketing academics and practitioners. She defines sensory marketing as “marketing that engages the consumers' senses and affects their perception, judgment and behavior (and suggests that) from a managerial perspective, sensory marketing can be used to create subconscious triggers that characterize consumer perceptions of abstract notions of the product (e.g., its sophistication or quality)”.
In more than fifty published articles, Aradhna Krishna has explored ways in which a product’s look, feel, taste, sound, and smell contribute to how it is perceived, and how people respond to it. Illustrating her research, she also edited and contributed to the book, Sensory Marketing: Research on the Sensuality of Products, in 2009. She also runs an international sensory marketing research laboratory. In 2013, she published a book, Customer Sense: How the 5 Senses Influence Buying Behavior, which Kirkus Reviews calls "A sophisticated, easy-handed elucidation of the practice of marketing to our senses".
Some important concepts introduced by Professor Krishna's work are perceived consumption, guiltless gluttony, and Smellizing. Raghubir and Krishna (1999) show that container shapes can impact perceived consumption, which is how much consumers think they have eaten or drunk as opposed to how much they have actually eaten or drunk. Aydinoglu and Krishna (2011) show that food size labels (e.g., a large size portion of French fries being labeled medium) can result in believing that one has not eaten too much and thus not feeling guilty about it (guiltless gluttony). Smellizing is a term coined by Prof. Krishna (Krishna, Morrin and Sayin 2014) to reflect “imagining smells”. Krishna, Morrin and Sayin (2014) show that smellizing foods can result in similar physiological responses (salivation) as real smells, when a picture of the food is also available.
Besides sensory marketing, she works on designing winning cause marketing and corporate social responsibility programs, and on constructing engaging pricing and promotion policies.

The implications of Aradhna Krishna’s research and expertise have been recognized not only within academia, but within business in general, being frequently quoted in outlets such as Time magazine, The New York Times, and the Telegraph, among others.

Aradhna Krishna is a lead Area Editor for the Journal of Consumer Psychology, an area editor for Management Science and serves on the editorial boards of Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Consumer Research, and Marketing Science.

She is a consultant to several firms and also serves as expert witness on issues of sensory marketing, pricing and social marketing.

Fellow of the Society for Consumer Psychology.
Ross School of Business Senior Faculty Research Award 2007.
Best paper award at Winter American Marketing Association conference 2006.
Outstanding reviewer award -- Journal of Consumer Research (2002-2003).
William R. Davidson Award for best paper to appear in the Journal of Retailing in 2002).

American Marketing Association Doctoral Dissertation competition Winner, 1990.

• Aydinoglu, Nilufer Z. and Aradhna Krishna (2011), "Guiltless Gluttony: The Asymmetric Effect of Size Labels on Size Perceptions and Consumption," Journal of Consumer Research, Vol. 37, No. 6 (April 2011), 1095-1112.
• Krishna, Aradhna, Ryan S. Elder, Cindy Caldara (2010), "Feminine to smell but masculine to touch? Multisensory congruence and its effect on the aesthetic experience", Journal of Consumer Psychology, Vol. 20, No. 4, Oct. 2010, 410-418.
• Krishna, Aradhna, May Lwin and Maureen Morrin (2010), "Product Scent and Memory", Journal of Consumer Research 37(June) 57-67.
• Lwin, May, Maureen Morrin, and Aradhna Krishna (2010), "Exploring the Superadditive Effects of Scent and Pictures on Verbal Recall: An Extension of Dual Coding Theory", Journal of Consumer Psychology 20(3), 317-326.
• Krishna, Aradhna and Maureen Morrin (2008), "Does Touch Affect Taste? The Perceptual Transfer of Product Container Haptic Cues", Journal of Consumer Research, April, Vol. 34, 807-818.
• Krishna, Aradhna (2005), "How Big is Tall?", Forethought, Harvard Business Review, April, Vol. 83, Issue 4, 18-19.