About

Melissa Bublitz is a Professor of Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Department Chair and Professor of Consumer Science, and Professor of Civil Society & Community Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison's School of Human Ecology. Her research focuses on the intersection of consumer behavior, public policy, and well-being, investigating topics such as food and nutrition access, sustainability, nonprofit marketing, and social innovation. As a member of the Transformative Consumer Research community, she often leads teams of researchers collaborating with community stakeholders to study efforts aimed at creating positive societal impact and grassroots social change. Her work seeks to leverage science to empower consumers and organizations to make choices that enhance the well-being of individuals and communities.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Public relations
• Marketing
• Psychology
• Economics
• Economic growth
• Business
• Social psychology

Selected publications

• Ending hunger requires local food: a case study of the Hunger Task Force Farm

  Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks · 2026-01-20

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

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

  article1st authorCorresponding

  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.

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• We’re All in This Together: Collaborative Approaches to Create Societal Impact

  Journal of the Association for Consumer Research · 2025-10-16

  article1st authorCorresponding
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• We’ll Stand by You: Understanding Community-Based Philanthropic Giving

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

  article1st authorCorresponding

  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.

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• Cultivating a Collaborative Giving Mindset

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

  article1st authorCorresponding
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• We’re on the Rise: How Social Movements Support Youth Well-Being

  Journal of the Association for Consumer Research · 2023-11-07 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Youth—people ages of 15–24 years—are at the forefront of present-day social movements focused on climate justice, civic activation, gun reform, and racial justice. Social movements occur when people with a shared purpose come together to take collective action in order to achieve a social justice goal. This article examines how youth-organized social movements not only propel individual and collective action but also actively support and sustain youth well-being. We define well-being as feeling positive, socially connected, and purposeful. We explore social movement practices for promoting individual and collective youth well-being. This research builds on dual insights: (1) the well-being practices of youth social movement organizers and (2) the extant literature in consumer research and its associated disciplines. Finally, we highlight insights from consumer research that advance our understanding of youth well-being and raise questions to encourage more researchers to investigate how social movements support youth well-being and well-doing.

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• Climate action now: How to fuel a social movement

  Journal of Consumer Psychology · 2023-09-04 · 15 citations

  articleOpen access

  Abstract Our research develops a framework that explores how to fuel the climate movement by accelerating grassroots, community‐based climate action. Drawing on insights from consumer psychology, our framework identifies the psychological mechanisms that encourage and motivate people, both individually and collectively, to take climate action, thereby contributing to our understanding of how to advance social action and propel a social movement. Our climate action framework builds on: (1) individuals we describe as climate upstanders who rise up to take climate action with like‐minded others, and (2) communities of climate upstanders who engage in collective action aimed at addressing the climate crisis. Our framework expands the field of consumer psychology by redefining the role of consumers to include the practice of social action and broadening the study of consumers to include collective, community‐based action. We call on consumer psychologists to research individual and collective consumer practices related to social action and contribute to making social good central to the study of consumer psychology.

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• We Will Rise: How Stories Unite Social Movements

  Journal of the Association for Consumer Research · 2023-09-19 · 6 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Stories can inspire and propel people’s individual and collective action to unite social movements. In this article, we outline key social movement storytelling practices and integrate them with insights from academic research to build a framework for understanding how stories unite social movements. This framework includes research-supported storytelling practices for two types of essential social movement stories: individual me and movement we stories. Stories of me are the personal stories of individual changemakers. Stories of we are the stories that these individuals tell about the movement. We identify how individual changemakers’ me stories intersect with and strengthen a movement’s we story. Finally, we highlight insights that deepen our conceptual and practical understanding of social movement storytelling.

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• Plant power: <scp>SEEDing</scp> our future with plant‐based eating

  Journal of Consumer Psychology · 2022-10-24 · 18 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract The climate crisis, coupled with the COVID‐19 pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement, are contributing to a shift in what people eat. For environmental sustainability, ethical, social justice, and health reasons, people are embracing plant‐based diets, which involve consuming mostly fruits, vegetables, grains, and beans and little or no meat and dairy products. Drawing on insights from consumer psychology, this review synthesizes academic research at the intersection of food and consumer values to propose a framework for understanding how and why these values— S ustainability, E thics, E quity, and D ining for health—are transforming what people eat. We term our model the SEED framework. We build this framework around a report assembled by the Rockefeller Foundation (2021) that describes how to grow a value‐based societal food system. Finally, we highlight insights from consumer psychology that promote an understanding of how consumer values are shifting people's diets and raise research questions to encourage more consumer psychologists to investigate how and why values influence what consumers eat, which in turn impacts the well‐being of people, our environment, and society.

  PublisherDOI

• Scaling Social Impact: Marketing to Grow Nonprofit Solutions

  Journal of Public Policy & Marketing · 2022-03-04 · 33 citations

  articleOpen access

  Nonprofit organizations addressing societal challenges such as hunger, poverty, and racial inequities want to grow the impact of their promising solutions to these problems—scaling social impact. Yet, local, community-based nonprofits often struggle to identify a path to scale their impact. To address this problem, the authors partnered with 11 nonprofits engaged in social impact scaling. By integrating insights on scaling from these nonprofit research partners together with academic research on scaling across a range of disciplines, they outline a framework for scaling community-based nonprofits and the marketing practices that support it. This research advances a two-stage social impact scaling framework termed “T-shaped Scaling.” Within this framework, the vertical bar of the T refers to “scaling deep,” grounding solutions within a community, and the horizontal bar of the T represents “scaling wide,” adapting and transferring the scaled deep solutions to new communities. This framework advances both conceptual and practical understandings of social impact scaling. Finally, the authors explore the policy implications of social impact scaling and call on researchers in marketing to further investigate the scaling strategies and marketing practices that grow social impact.

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Frequent coauthors

• Laura A. Peracchio

  University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee

  124 shared

• Jennifer Edson Escalas

  106 shared

• Elizabeth G. Miller

  103 shared

• Mentor Dida

  University of Wisconsin–Oshkosh

  100 shared

• Lan Nguyen Chaplin

  100 shared

• Ashley Deutsch Cermin

  Marquette University

  100 shared

• Meike Eilert

  University of Nebraska System

  100 shared

• Alexei Gloukhovtsev

  Aalto University

  100 shared

Education

• Ph.D. Management Science - Marketing, Marketing

  University of Wisconsin Milwaukee

  2011

Awards & honors

• 2022 Thomas C. Kinnear/Journal of Public Policy & Marketing…