About

Elizabeth Miller is a Professor of Marketing and the Department Chair at the Isenberg School of Management at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She holds a PhD in Marketing from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, earned in 2003, along with an MA in Marketing from the same institution obtained in 2001. Her undergraduate degree is a double major in Psychology and Chemistry from Cornell University, completed in 1998. Dr. Miller has served as an Associate Professor of Marketing at UMass Amherst since July 2013 and has been the PhD Coordinator for the Marketing Department since the same time. Prior to her current position, she was an Assistant Professor of Marketing at Boston College from 2003 to 2011. Her research interests include the influence of affect on the use and interpretation of information, consumer decision-making, health decisions, affect and behavior, and consumer well-being. She has been recognized with awards such as the Best Research Paper at the Direct/Interactive Marketing Research Summit in 2013 and the Research Excellence Award from the Isenberg School in 2013.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Business
• Marketing
• Economics
• Economic growth
• Public relations

Selected publications

• EXPRESS: We the People: Public Advocacy for Public Policy

  Journal of Public Policy & Marketing · 2026-03-14

  article

  This research is designed to propel the study of public advocacy for public policy within the Transformative Consumer Research and marketing disciplines. We define public advocacy as a systematic process of persuasion to gain enduring public support for an idea, belief, course of action, law, or policy. In this research, we sought out and partnered with experienced experts and organizational leaders doing public advocacy work across a variety of functional areas (e.g., grassroots organizing, social movements, lobbying, media interventions to shift cultural norms) and diverse topics (e.g., hunger, economic justice, pay equity, workers’ rights, voting rights, etc.) We build on insights drawn from their experiences and academic research related to advocacy to innovate a conceptual framework for public advocacy. We call on researchers to investigate and advance knowledge about public advocacy and its impact on public policy, individual and community well-being, and transformative social change.

  PublisherDOI

• Navigating a Changing Privacy Landscape: The Effect of Data Requests on the Acquisition, Retention, and Deletion of Consumers’ Information

  Journal of Interactive Marketing · 2026-01-13

  articleOpen access

  Privacy regulations, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (Article 17) and California Consumer Privacy Act, give consumers the right to request the deletion of their personal information. While researchers have begun to examine the implications of these laws, the effects of different data request options (to provide, keep, or delete information) on consumers’ personal-information-sharing behavior have not been thoroughly studied. Drawing on prior work on autonomy, the authors investigate a new construct, “enactment autonomy.” They demonstrate that data requests can alter perceptions of shared autonomy, influencing feelings of vulnerability and subsequent information-sharing behavior. Six experimental studies, including one behavioral study and a within-paper meta-analysis, provide support for the proposed data request effect as well as boundary conditions related to perceived information sensitivity and the presence of a third party.

  PublisherDOI

• We’ll Stand by You: Understanding Community-Based Philanthropic Giving

  Journal of Public Policy & Marketing · 2025-05-25 · 2 citations

  article

  The established academic conceptualization of philanthropy is the gifting of monetary resources to nonprofit organizations. The authors extend and broaden this understanding of philanthropy by examining a fuller spectrum of ways philanthropic givers support nonprofits. In this research, the authors sought out and partnered with experienced philanthropic givers and advisors, including foundation leaders, who prioritize supporting community-based nonprofits. Because community-based nonprofits are proximate to both the inequities in the communities they serve and promising solutions for addressing those inequities, research provides evidence that these nonprofits have the potential to transform communities and create positive impact. The authors found that their research partners’ philanthropic giving involves resourcing and building relationships with community-based nonprofits by offering them funding plus other forms of support, including the givers’ time, connections, and expertise. The authors build on these findings by constructing a broadened framework for philanthropy that integrates insights gleaned from their research partners and academic research on philanthropy. The authors explore the policy implications of community-based philanthropy and call on researchers in marketing to further investigate and advance knowledge about philanthropic giving.

  PublisherDOI

• Cultivating a Collaborative Giving Mindset

  Journal of the Association for Consumer Research · 2025-09-04

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Brand Faith: How Spiritual Relationships Develop Between Consumers and Brands

  Journal of Consumer Research · 2025-10-05 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access

  Abstract Consumers increasingly seek spiritual satisfaction and existential meaning through brands. However, despite the rising prominence of secular forms of spirituality, consumer–brand relationship research largely overlooks the processes by which consumers initiate, develop, and maintain spiritual connections to brands. Using the concept of faith as a theoretical lens, this article explores how consumer–brand relationships take on spiritual dimensions. Drawing on an interpretive biographic analysis of in-depth interviews and netnographic data, the authors examine spiritual relationship development processes as they unfold between consumers and brands over time. Findings identify five phases of brand faith development (intuition, association, reflection, affirmation, and universalization), which progress from initial attraction to deep conviction. Consumers cultivate faith in brands across these phases through a process of believing in, valuing, and committing to a brand as a sacred entity that acts as a center of spiritual meaning. These findings offer a more nuanced understanding of spiritual relationships between consumers and secular brands than current literature provides. The analysis also examines factors that facilitate or inhibit brand faith development, contributing a contextual understanding of brand faith that accounts for influences arising from an interplay between personal, brand, and marketplace factors that affect consumer spirituality.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Enhancing consumer responses to misshapen produce: leveraging awe to promote sustainability

  Journal of Consumer Marketing · 2025-10-15 · 1 citations

  articleSenior author

  Purpose A significant amount of produce is wasted because it does not conform to consumers’ aesthetic expectations. This study aims to explore the role of awe as a potential emotional appeal for reducing the amount of food waste caused by misshapen produce. Design/methodology/approach Across four experiments, the authors examine the role of awe in consumers’ acceptance of misshapen produce. In the experiments, to enhance the validity of findings, the authors use different produce items (apple, carrot, lemon), operationalizations of awe (dispositional awe in Study1, manipulated awe with writing task in Study 2, manipulated awe with video task in Study 3, manipulated awe with a billboard visual in Study 4) and consumer responses (attitude and purchase intention). Findings Results indicate that while misshapen produce negatively affects consumers’ responses, the emotion of awe mitigates this negative effect. Awe enhances consumers’ attitudes and purchase intentions toward misshapen produce. In addition, consumers’ evaluations of misshapen produce mediate the relationship between awe and consumer responses. Practical implications This research introduces a new intervention, awe, that marketers can use to increase acceptance of misshapen produce. By integrating awe into marketing strategies, marketers, governments and scholars can foster a more inclusive and sustainable food system that values all kinds of produce regardless of appearance. Originality/value This research contributes to the sustainability literature by introducing awe as a novel intervention in combatting food waste. The studies highlight the transformative power of awe in mitigating the negative effects of misshapen produce on consumers by enhancing consumers’ product evaluations.

  PublisherDOI

• Creativity is in the mind of the beholder: hail the analytic thinker

  Journal of Consumer Marketing · 2024-10-24 · 1 citations

  article

  Purpose While the extant literature establishes that creativity in advertisements enhances ad effectiveness, developing creative advertisements is costly and creativity perceptions are subjective varying from person to person. Therefore, it is important to study the factors that influence the creativity assessments of consumers. Accordingly, this paper aims to investigate the impact of thinking style on creativity assessments of advertisements. Design/methodology/approach Five studies (two surveys and three experiments) demonstrate that individuals with higher levels of analytic thinking style perceive creative advertisements as more creative. This result holds for a self-reported thinking style scale (Studies 1, 2 and 3) as well as for primed thinking styles (Studies 4 and 5) and for different product categories/ads (coffee in Study 1, furniture store in Study 2, and juice in Studies 3, 4 and 5). Findings The findings show that analytic thinkers perceive the same creative advertisement as more creative than holistic thinkers. In addition, the advanced creativity perception due to analytic thinking reflects positively on managerially important variables (willingness to pay a premium: Study 1, attitude toward ad: Study 2 and Study 4 post-test). Originality/value To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this research is the first to investigate an individual difference, namely, thinking style, that impacts creativity judgments, which in turn enhances advertising effectiveness.

  PublisherDOI

• Expanding consumer mindfulness for collective sustainable well‐being: Overview of the special issue and future research directions

  Journal of Consumer Affairs · 2023-04-01 · 9 citations

  articleSenior author

  Abstract This special issue focuses on the potential of mindfulness to enhance consumer well‐being. While various disciplines have investigated the psychological and physiological benefits of mindfulness, its potential for consumer well‐being remains largely underexplored. Moreover, there have been concerns about the efficacy of secular mindfulness, which is being criticized for its limited focus on non‐judgmental awareness while neglecting its original contemplative and ethical foundations. This omission is especially problematic when considering mindfulness as an intervention for issues such as overconsumption, addictions, and other harmful habits impacting individuals, society, and the environment. This introductory article expands the definition of consumer well‐being to prioritize the positive feelings and effective functioning of groups and ecosystems over short‐term individual benefits, summarizes the eight articles in the issue, identifies six themes that broaden the scope of mindfulness, and presents a framework for exploring how the special issue articles and future research can promote collective sustainable well‐being.

  PublisherDOI

• Shades of awe: The role of awe in consumers' pro‐environmental behavior

  Journal of Consumer Behaviour · 2023-07-21 · 39 citations

  articleOpen access

  Abstract Climate change is a critical issue right now. Despite substantial work in academia examining this issue, more solutions are needed to encourage consumers to engage in more pro‐environmental behavior. In the current research, we explore the ability of awe, a unique and powerful self‐transcendent emotion, to motivate pro‐environmental behavior and green consumption. Using different methods to induce awe and assess the effect of awe on consumers' pro‐environmental behavior, we conducted three experimental studies. Across our studies, our results show that when consumers feel awe, they are more likely to engage in pro‐environmental behavior and consumption. Further, we distinguish among three kinds of awe (awe of nature, awe of God, and awe from man‐made wonders) and show that awe arising from nature and from God increases pro‐environmental behavior more than awe from man‐made wonders. In addition, a series of mediation analyses show that the effects distinguishing different sources of awe are best accounted for by different mediators rather than one common mediator; specifically these relationships are mediated by consumers' feelings of small self (i.e., diminished self‐concept) and their level of spirituality, respectively. Implications for how marketers and practitioners can best utilize the power of awe for encouraging pro‐environmental behavior are discussed.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Ending Hunger: How COVID-19 Revealed a Path to Food Access for All

  Journal of the Association for Consumer Research · 2022-12-06 · 4 citations

  article

  This article explores how a devastating hunger crisis, which seemed destined to accompany the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, was thwarted by historic federal emergency food policy interventions. We outline the vital public policy innovations in food access launched during the COVID-19 pandemic as well as the nonprofit emergency food network programs designed to implement and accompany these policies. In particular, we focus on innovations that addressed hunger for two vulnerable groups, children and the elderly, and we describe how these innovations increased food access. Finally, we advocate for the continuation of COVID-19 anti-hunger pandemic policies in the “next normal” because they reveal a path to end hunger that preserves people’s dignity and provides healthy and affordable food access for all.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Laura A. Peracchio

  University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee

  103 shared

• Melissa G. Bublitz

  103 shared

• Jennifer Edson Escalas

  101 shared

• Ashley Deutsch Cermin

  Marquette University

  100 shared

• Mentor Dida

  University of Wisconsin–Oshkosh

  100 shared

• Alexei Gloukhovtsev

  Aalto University

  100 shared

• Lan Nguyen Chaplin

  100 shared

• Meike Eilert

  University of Nebraska System

  100 shared

Labs

• Miller LabPI

Awards & honors

• Best Research Paper, Direct/Interactive Marketing Research S…
• Research Excellence Award, Isenberg School, University of Ma…
• Mellon Mutual Team Mentorship Grant, University of Massachus…