Söderlund, Magnus

My research comprises consumer behavior, and I am interested in consumers’ reactions to marketing stimuli – such as encountering a sales person, interacting with a service worker, being in a store environment, and marketing communications. Examples of reactions in my studies are customer satisfaction, loyalty, emotions, justice perceptions, attitudes, and intentions. These reactions mirror the broad view of “behavior” in consumer research: psychological reactions, and thus not only behavior as it is manifested in observable activities, are important for our understanding of what it means to be a consumer (and a marketer) in a society increasingly obsessed with consumption.

Studies of such reactions are essentially studies of influence, in a causal sense, and I believe that the experiment is a particularly well-suited method to capture the influence of marketing activities on consumers. My most recent book, Experiments in Marketing, deals with experiments as a means of assessing influence.

Currently, I am interested in consumers’ reactions to humanlike non-human agents, such as virtual assistants and embodied service robots. The idea is that human-to-robot interactions will be common in the not-so-distant future, and that there is a need already today to find out more about how we humans react when we are faced with non-human entities.

Magnus Söderlund