Shi (shir) Zhang is an Associate Professor (with tenure) at the UCLA Anderson Graduate School of Management. He received a Ph.D. in Marketing from Columbia University in 1997 and joined the faculty at UCLA in the same year. Prior to his academic career in marketing, he had served on the faculty of Arts and Sciences at Duke University from 1990 to 1993 after obtaining a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Arizona in 1990. Professor Zhang currently teaches marketing management courses to students in the MBA, fully-employed MBA (FEMBA) and executive MBA (EMBA) programs at the Anderson School (Advertising and Marketing Communications, Global Marketing Management, Marketing Strategy and Policy). He also teaches seminars to doctoral students (Consumer Behavior, Behavioral Research Methods). Professor Zhang is a native Chinese and came to the U.S.A. in 1985, after earning a M.A. in Linguistics from Nankai University in 1985 and a B.A. in English from Heilongjiang University in 1982.

Professor Zhang studies marketing problems from a psychological, behavioral perspective, using experimental methods. These problems include product differentiation, market entry, brand naming, advertising and communications. 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. 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-cutural consumer research, and it suggests how firms can leverage differences between consumers to formulate brand naming and positioning strategies. His work has been published in leading journals in the field. For additional information, see Research, Teaching, and Cirriculum Vitae.