Portrait image for Shi(shir) Zhang

Shi(shir) Zhang

Associate Professor of Marketing
“As bilingual consumer environments become increasingly prevalent, consider a key theoretical question: How do bilingual consumers process bilingual information?”
(310) 794-6475
Areas of Expertise:
  • Advertising and Marketing Communications
  • Branding
  • Consumer Decision-Making
  • Consumer Behavior
  • International Marketing
  • Market Entry
About
 

Biography

An expert in consumer behavior and marketing strategy, Associate Professor Shi (pronounced “shir”) Zhang has been using experimental methods to study marketing problems from a psychological, behavioral perspective in fields that range from product differentiation and market entry to brand naming, advertising and communication. He has also done innovative work using comparison and feature alignability to form strategies for market entry and marketing communications, as well as areas of brand naming and positioning in the international market.

His theoretical research interests are in the area of how cognitive representations of information influence consumer cognition and decision making. In particular, he has studied representations of product differentiating features in consumer preference formation. This research develops a framework to address the role of comparison and feature alignability in forming strategies for market entry and marketing communications.

Zhang is a frequent speaker at professional conferences and seminars, and author of articles in leading journals of marketing, consumer behavior and applied psychology. He has also studied representations of linguistic structures and their impact on information processing, comparative cognitions and decision making. This research provides frameworks for brand naming and international/cross-cultural consumer research, and it suggests how firms can leverage differences between consumers to formulate brand naming and positioning strategies.

Zhang teaches marketing management (strategy and policy, advertising and communications, and global marketing) in UCLA Anderson's EMBA, FEMBA and MBA programs and organizes and teaches in the school's executive education programs. He has served as a consultant for international companies that include Google, Roche, Wrigley's and China Unicom. He is a former faculty member of Duke University.

Education

Ph.D. Marketing, Columbia University

Ph.D. Linguistics, University of Arizona

 

Published Papers

Brakus, J.J., Schmitt, BH. And Shi Zhang. (forthcoming). Experiential Product Attributes and Preferences for New Products: The Role of Processing Fluency. Journal of Business Research, [ Link ]

Bernd Schmitt and Shi Zhang. (2012). Selecting the right brand name: An examination of tacit and explicit linguistic knowledge in name translations. Journal of Brand Management, 19 (June/July), 655-665. [ Link ]

Bao, Y., Zhang, S., and Simpson, J.T.. (2012). Promoting Products with Unfavorable Country of Origin: The Role of Brand Name and Spokesperson. Handbook of Research in International Marketing, 48-67. [ Link ]

Krishna, Aradhna, Rongrong Zhou and Shi Zhang. (2008). The Effect of Self-Construal on Spatial Judgments. Journal of Consumer Research, Vol. 35 (October), 337-348. [ Link ]

Brakus, J. Josko, Bernd H. Schmitt and Shi Zhang. (2008). Experiential Attributes and Consumer Judgments. in Handbook on Brand and Experience Management, Bernd H. Schmitt and David L. Rogers, eds., Edward Elgar, 174-187. [ Link ]

Sood, Sanjay and Shi Zhang. (2008). The Role of Brand Naming in Branding Strategies: Insights and Opportunities. in Handbook on Brand and Experience Management, Bernd H. Schmitt and David L. Rogers, eds., Edward Elgar, 219-232. [ Link ]

Gontijo, Possidonia F. D. and Shi Zhang. (2007). The Mental Representation of Brand Names: Are Brand Names a Class by Themselves?. in Psycholinguistic Phenomena in Marketing Communications, Ed. Tina Lowery, 23-37. [ Link ]