Indian American professor of Marketing Rashmi Adaval, has been named the next James S. Womack/Gemini Chair of Signage and Visual Marketing at University of Cincinnati’s Carl H. Lindner College of Business.
Adaval succeeds Professor Emeritus James Kellaris as the Womack/Gemini Chair, a position founded by Sharon and James Weinel in 2007 to establish a partnership with the signage industry.
“The Weinels recognized the importance of academic research in advancing the signage industry and the establishment of the chair has spurred research and industry partnerships,” said Karen Machleit, marketing professor and department head. “Dr. Kellaris contributed significantly to both research and partnerships, and Dr. Adaval is the perfect researcher to succeed him. She is already known for her research on visual information processing, and she will continue to advance knowledge in signage and visual communication.”
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Adaval holds a longtime, self-described “fascination” with humans using art, symbols and decorative elements to communicate. Those interests have shown up in Adaval’s research, where she has been at the forefront of analysis on narratives and stories in the consumer domain.
“I consider how consumers notice and interpret visual information in advertising and in product design. Understanding how individuals recognize and interpret information is essential knowledge when creating signs, but also when creating any sort of visual communication that is designed to attract attention and communicate important information,” Adaval said. “This research chair will allow me to continue my work in this area and will ultimately benefit the signage industry as well as marketers that desire to effectively and efficiently present information to their customers.”
In the years since the creation of the Womack/Gemini position, Lindner has collaborated with the signage industry through involvement in Signage Foundation activities, experiential learning focused on signage and visual marketing, and UC’s College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning’s Terence M. Fruth/Gemini Chair of Signage Design.
Adaval received her PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. Prior to joining the University of Cincinnati, she held faculty positions at the Hong Kong University of Science & Technology where she was the founding director of the Behavioral Sciences Research Lab and Faculty Fellow at the Institute of Emerging Market Studies.
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She has also held positions at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign where she was the James F. Towey Faculty Fellow.
Adaval’s research focuses on how people process information that is in different modalities and formats. She examines how such information is represented in memory, whether it elicits feelings and mental imagery, and the implications this has for consumer judgments and decisions. She has been one of the pioneers in research on narratives (stories) in the consumer domain.
Her work on narratives, visual processing, imagery, feelings, and numerical cognition has been published in top-tier journals in Marketing such as the Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Consumer Psychology, Journal of the Association for Consumer Research, and Psychology such as Journal of Experimental Psychology – General, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, and Advances in Experimental Social Psychology.
She has served as the Associate Editor of the Journal of Consumer Research and Journal of Consumer Psychology, Guest Editor at the Journal of Marketing Research, and Editor at the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research. In addition, she serves on the editorial boards of several journals in Marketing and Psychology.