Pankaj Aggarwal

Pankaj Aggarwal received his PhD in marketing from the University of Chicago in 2002. He also holds an MBA in marketing from the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, India in 1983, and his BA in economics from St. Stephen's College, Delhi University.

Aggarwal worked in the advertising industry in India for more than 14 years, leaving his position as vice president at J. Walter Thompson (Contract Advertising) in 1997 to pursue a career in academics. He taught advertising management for three years to graduate students at the Indian Institute of Mass Communication, New Delhi. Aggarwal is the winner of Alden G. Clayton award given by MSI for doctoral dissertation proposal, 2000, and an ad-hoc reviewer for the Journal of Consumer Psychology.

His research studies how people respond to actions taken by marketers depending upon how they perceive their relationship with the brands. This research is based on work that suggests that consumer-brand relationships sometimes parallel common relationships that people form with other people. The theoretical basis of this research is that the differences that people exhibit in their interactions with brands can be traced back to the type of relationship norms, or what is generally accepted to be 'right way to behave' in that relationship. This research argues that consumers may evaluate actions that produce the same economic costs or benefits differently depending on the relationship norms that are salient at the time of the evaluation. These results have much deeper implications because they suggest that consumers do not so much evaluate products with an eye to maximizing the results of their decision so much as they are trying very hard to do the "right" thing-with "rightness" suggested by social norms of behavior more so than economic payoff.

Interesting implications for marketers follow. Broadly speaking, marketers can be more effective in their decision making if they can better understand the relationship that their brand has with the consumers, and also understand the 'right' norms of that relationship. Specifically, some of the findings suggest that consumers respond differently to offers of cash discount and free gifts depending upon their relationships type. More recent work finds that differences in consumers' responses to product failure are dependent on the type of consumer-brand relationship. There are definite prescriptions for more effective brand management in the face of poor product performance.

Aggarwal is an associate professor of management at the University of Toronto, Canada.