Debora Thompson, Georgetown McDonough School of Business

Every week a business school professor, an expert in his or her field, defines a key term on FT Lexicon, our online economics, business and finance glossary.

Our professor this week

Debora Thompson, associate professor of marketing at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business, is an expert in consumer behaviour, decision making, information processing, comparative advertising and attitude change.

Since joining McDonough in 2006, Prof Thompson has been published in the field’s top academic journals including the Journal of Consumer Research, the Journal of Marketing Research and the Harvard Business Review. Prof Thompson is recognised for her research focusing on consumers’ judgment, decision making and persuasion techniques. Using psychological principles to predict how consumers form preferences, Prof Thompson’s research offers business leaders and industry executives recommendations for the most effective marketing strategies.

In her most recent study published by the American Marketing Association’s Journal of Marketing, Consumer-generated Ads: Does Awareness of Advertising Co-Creation Help or Hurt Persuasion?, Prof Thompson and co-author Prashant Malaviya, associate professor of marketing at McDonough, recommend that companies who co-create advertisements with consumers should provide background information about the ad creator to increase the persuasiveness of the advertisement. Prof Thompson’s research suggests that consumer-generated advertising campaigns are more effective in engaging and retaining a brand’s loyal customers than growing the share of customers who are not previously loyal to the brand.

Prof Thompson has chosen to define the term scepticism identification model

Why Prof Thompson thinks the scepticism identification model is important

Prof Thompson believes that the scepticism identification model extends our understanding of how consumers respond to consumer-generated advertising and user-generated content in general.

“It outlines conditions in which consumers may resist the interference of other consumers in shaping a brand’s image,” Prof Thompson says.

To find out more about scepticism identification models, click on the linked terms.