About

H. Rao Unnava is the Michael and Joelle Hurlston Dean and Professor of Marketing at UC Davis Graduate School of Management. His research focuses on issues related to brand loyalty, consumer response to advertising and sales promotions, and consumer memory. His work has been published in prominent journals such as the Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Consumer Research, Marketing Letters, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Journal of International Consumer Marketing, and Advances in Consumer Research. He serves on the editorial review boards of the Journal of Consumer Research and the Journal of Consumer Psychology. Unnava has extensive teaching experience at both undergraduate and graduate levels, covering courses in marketing management and strategy, marketing research, consumer behavior, promotional strategy, human memory processes, and international marketing. He has received multiple teaching awards, including being named Outstanding Undergraduate Teacher by the student chapter of the American Marketing Association seven times, winning the Westerbeck Undergraduate teaching award twice, and receiving the Bostic-Georges service award in 2014. Prior to joining UC Davis in June 2016, he spent 32 years at The Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business, where he earned his Ph.D. and served as the W. Arthur Cullman professor of marketing, as well as holding roles such as associate dean of undergraduate programs, associate dean of executive education, and director of doctoral programs in business. Unnava is also one of the founders of Angi (formerly Angie’s List). He is currently on the board of directors of PRIDE Industries and serves on the board of the Bay Area Council. His educational background includes a Ph.D. in business administration from The Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business, a Post Graduate Diploma in management from the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta, and a B.Tech. in electronics engineering from Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University.

Research topics

• Artificial Intelligence
• Computer Science
• Psychology
• Advertising
• Social psychology
• Business
• Marketing
• Engineering
• Neuroscience
• Computer vision
• Cognitive psychology

Selected publications

• A double-edged sword: the effect of brand self-regulatory messages on brand attitude in the U.S.

  Journal of Brand Management · 2024 · 1 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Business
  • Advertising
  • Marketing
  PublisherDOI

• Examining consumers’ sensory experiences with color: A consumer neuroscience approach

  Psychology and Marketing · 2020 · 34 citations

  • Computer Science
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Psychology

  Abstract This research advances neuroscience as a tool with which to study consumers’ visual mental imagery. Applying these methods, we suggest that the presence or absence of color is a critical dimension along which consumers’ visualizations can vary, and explore when and why color of visual mental imagery becomes more prominent. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we find neural evidence for distinguishing black‐and‐white (BW) versus color visualization, and that visual mental imagery becomes increasingly monochrome (vs. colorful) when consumers imagine distant (vs. near) future events. Our neural evidence further suggests construal level as the underlying mechanism of this effect, showing common regions of activation for imagining distant future events, engaging in high‐level construal, and forming BW mental imagery. We discuss the implication of these findings and the benefits of fMRI techniques for marketing in general.

  PublisherDOI

• The “Buzz” Behind the Buzz Matters: Energetic and Tense Arousal as Separate Motivations for Word of Mouth

  Journal of Consumer Psychology · 2019-11-16 · 20 citations

  articleSenior author

  This research provides a novel theoretical framework to explain the missing mechanism behind one of the strongest predictors for engaging in word of mouth (WOM): the consumer's psychological arousal (i.e., greater arousal leads to greater WOM; e.g., Berger, 2011). Across six studies ( N = 1,309), we provide evidence for a motivational theory of the arousal–WOM relationship, highlighting the importance of the WOM's valence (positive vs. negative) as well as the consumer's salient type of arousal (energetic vs. tense; Thayer, 1989). In doing so, we demonstrate that consumers use WOM as an arousal management strategy : They are motivated to engage in positive WOM to maintain or increase their energetic arousal and to engage in negative WOM to reduce or eliminate their tense arousal. These findings also demonstrate the importance of the WOM recipient's response for the WOM source to achieve his/her desired arousal state. Thus, this work both expands our understanding of the arousal–WOM relationship and provides a framework for interpreting past work and conducting future investigations into when and how consumers will engage in WOM.

  PublisherDOI

• Felt Ambivalence: Exploring the Storage Structure and Role of Situational Relevance on the Accessibility of Dominant and Conflicting Reactions

  ACR North American Advances · 2018-01-01

  articleSenior author
  Publisher

• Coffee with co-workers: role of caffeine on evaluations of the self and others in group settings

  Journal of Psychopharmacology · 2018-04-05 · 8 citations

  articleSenior author

  This research explores the effect of consuming a moderate amount of commercially available caffeinated coffee on an individual's self-evaluated participation in a group activity and subsequent evaluations of the experience. Across two studies, results show that consuming a moderate amount of caffeinated coffee prior to indulging in a group activity enhances an individual's task-relevant participation in the group activity. In addition, subjective evaluations of the participation of other group members and oneself are also positively influenced. Finally, the positive impact of consuming a moderate amount of caffeinated coffee on the evaluation of participation of other group members and oneself is moderated by a sense of an increased level of alertness.

  PublisherDOI

• “Too true to be good?” when virtual reality decreases interest in actual reality

  Journal of Business Research · 2018-11-13 · 123 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

• When Good Consumers Turn Bad: Psychological Contract Breach in Committed Brand Relationships

  Journal of Consumer Psychology · 2017-12-08 · 69 citations

  articleSenior author

  To better understand the conditions under which committed consumers continue to support their preferred brand after a transgression versus turn against the brand and the underlying theoretical process, we study the interplay between brand commitment and specific types of transgressions. Across three scenario‐based and field studies, we show that consumers have psychological contracts with brands, which dictate the terms of the relationship, and for committed consumers, violations of any aspect in (out of) the contract results in a negative (indifferent) response. Furthermore, we demonstrate that consumer trust is the underlying mechanism: committed consumers exhibit more negative responses to in‐contract transgressions as a result of their lower trust in the brand.

  PublisherDOI

• Neurological evidence for the role of construal level in future-directed thought

  Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience · 2017-02-16 · 37 citations

  articleOpen access

  The ability to mentally represent future events is a significant human psychological achievement. A challenge that people encounter is that they often lack detailed specifics about distant relative to near future events. Construal level theory proposes that people represent distant future events by their abstract and essential features-a process referred to as high-level construal. As events become temporally proximal, people represent events by their increasingly available and reliable concrete and idiosyncratic features-a process referred to as low-level construal. The present fMRI experiment provides direct neural evidence for these assertions. Using the why-how localizer as a measure of construal level, results revealed brain regions associated with both temporal distance and high-level construal (medial prefrontal cortex), as well as temporal proximity and low-level construal (precuneus). We discuss the implications of these findings for the neuroscience of mental time travel and cognitive representation.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Role of Temporal Distance on the Color of Future-Directed Imagery: A Construal-Level Perspective

  Journal of Consumer Research · 2016-08-26 · 76 citations

  articleSenior author

  This research investigates the effect of temporal distance on how consumers “see” the future through their mind’s eye. Drawing from construal-level and visual perception theories, we propose that shape (vs. color) is a high-level (vs. low-level) visual feature. Because construal of the distant (vs. near) future generally focuses on high-level (vs. low-level) features, when consumers visualize the distant (vs. near) future, they should engage in processing that captures shape (vs. color): namely, imagery that is relatively more black and white (vs. colorful). Experiment 1 establishes that shape is a constant focus of visualization regardless of the temporal distance of future events, whereas the focus on color decreases as temporal distance increases. Using image matching, image reconstruction, and behavioral response time measures, respectively, experiments 2A, 2B, 2C, 3, and 4 test and find that participants’ visualization of the distant (vs. near) future is increasingly less colorful (i.e., more black and white). Experiment 5 establishes the underlying mechanism, showing that experimentally directing attention to high-level (vs. low-level) features directly promotes visualization that is less colorful (i.e., more black and white). Experiments 6A and 6B apply these findings to visual communications, suggesting that marketing messages about distant (vs. near) future events lead to greater willingness to pay when presented alongside black-and-white (vs. color) images.

  PublisherDOI

• A “Wide” Variety: Effects of Horizontal versus Vertical Display on Assortment Processing, Perceived Variety, and Choice

  Journal of Marketing Research · 2016-02-10 · 126 citations

  articleCorresponding

  The authors investigate how horizontal versus vertical displays of alternatives affect assortment processing, perceived variety, and subsequent choice. Horizontal (vs. vertical) displays are easier to process due to a match between the human binocular vision field (which is horizontal in direction) and the dominant direction of eye movements required for processing horizontal displays. It is demonstrated that this processing fluency allows people to browse information more efficiently, which increases perceived assortment variety and ultimately leads to more variety being chosen, and if the number of options chosen is allowed to vary, it leads to more options chosen. It is shown that because people see more variety in a horizontal (vs. vertical) display, they process a horizontal assortment more extensively. When more variety is positive, they find the choice task easier and have a higher level of satisfaction and confidence about their choices. When more variety is not necessarily positive, for example, in a choice of a single most-preferred option, these effects disappear. Two field studies, an eye-tracking study, and two lab studies support these conclusions.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Xiaoyan Deng

  Guangzhou Medical University

  15 shared

• Sekar Raju

  Iowa State University

  12 shared

• Robert E. Burnkrant

  12 shared

• Robert D. Jewell

  Kent State University

  9 shared

• Hyojin Lee

  San Jose State University

  7 shared

• Amit Surendra Singh

  Fisher College

  6 shared

• Kentaro Fujita

  The Ohio State University

  6 shared

• Nicole Votolato Montgomery

  University of Virginia

  6 shared

Awards & honors

• Poets&Quants Lifetime Leadership Award
• Poets&Quants Honors Dean H. Rao Unnava with Lifetime Achieve…
• Poets&Quants Honors Dean H. Rao Unnava as 2024 Dean Of The Y…