Academic profile - Professor Eva Kipnis

Consumer well-being and inclusion in Marketing

Eva Kipnis joined the University of Bradford in 2022 as Professor of Marketing in the School of Management. We caught up with her to find out about her research interests and background...

What drew you to the University of Bradford?

A lot of my work is around consumer well-being in the marketplace and cultural diversity, with a focus on discrimination. The University’s commitment to social inclusion, including being awarded UK’s University of the Year for Social Inclusion and its Centre for Inclusion and Diversity, meant it was a very natural fit for me in this regard.

Can you talk a bit more about the key themes of your areas of research interest in Marketing?

In terms of consumer well-being, we had a paper outlining directions for Diversity and Inclusion Engaged Marketing accepted in the Journal of Public Policy and Marketing in 2021 and we also have a white paper through that. This publication was a culmination of ten years of prior research I have been doing with various international collaborators into how marketing can impact discrimination or, on the contrary, promote inclusion. The paper generated interest from several non-academic stakeholders, including the representatives of Unstereotype Alliance, the UN based organization that is promoting the removal of gender stereotypes in advertising connected to women in marketing.

I also work with an organization called Women in Marketing, a global social enterprise head quartered in the UK which recognises and champions female marketeers. I have been a judge on their annual awards for past two years and have advocated for two new categories have been introduced, one of which is marketing scientist, and this year, they have introduced an award for students and recent graduates, which was sponsored by the School of Management.

I have led an informal research network for the last 11 years called Multicultural Marketplaces. So again, it's all to do with cultural diversity. We had several publications together throughout the years, and now we are working on writing up a project where we collaborated with students as researchers who were marketing the Faculty internationally to understand how to integrate diversity and inclusion into marketing curriculum

Can you tell us a bit about your background?

I come from an academic background, but my dad, who is a professor, advised me not to go in into academia straight away – he advised me that to work as a practitioner first would mean I had a depth of knowledge (and respect from students!). So, I was working as a marketeer consulting brands back in my home country in Kazakhstan, and what really interested me was why were companies getting such obvious things so wrong, so eventually I did my MSc on that topic.

I found this research inspiring, so I moved to the UK to undertake a PhD. I was really lucky with my director of study and several senior colleagues who mentored me – they have generously given me time and support, and great advice. So, my current work with doctoral students is a kind of paying back - I'm really passionate about working with doctoral students and doctoral education, supervising and mentoring doctoral students on such aspects as preparing for job market, building your academic brand, etc. In previous institutions I did quite a lot of work with doctoral students including running doctoral schools and research capacity building workshops.

What’s coming up for you?

I am chairing a conference this summer that I'm really excited about and honoured to be a part of. It's being held at Royal Holloway, University of London and this is only the second time it’s taking place outside the US. It's called the Transformative Consumer Research conference so again, it's all about research for consumer well-being. I'm co-chairing it with an academic from Royal Holloway and another scholar from the US, so it's also quite fun because it's also a cross institutional collaboration.

Here at the University, I hope that I can build relationships and collaborations - I do a lot of interdisciplinary work, including a recent project on how consumers with disabilities envisage a social carer robot, where we collaborated with engineers and sociologists alongside IBM. I’m looking forward to getting to know more colleagues and departments and discussing how we can work together.

Connect with Eva Kipnis on LinkedIn and find out more about her research on her Google Scholar account.