Chethana Achar
Associate Professor of Marketing
Chethana Achar studies how moral judgment, stigma, and perceived need shape consumer behavior, with a particular focus on health and socially sensitive markets. Her research examines how beliefs about controllability, deservingness, and responsibility influence whether consumers support, stigmatize, or punish others in the marketplace.
Her work spans public health, pharmaceuticals, crowdfunding, and emerging regulated categories such as cannabis and psychedelics. She investigates how minority ownership branding affects perceptions of expertise, how entrepreneurs’ health disclosures shape persuasion, how off-label consumption influences product inferences, and how the moralization of consumption shapes persuasive outcomes. Across projects, she explores how consumers infer motives and morality—and how those inferences drive marketplace behavior.
She teaches the Marketing Research & Analytics MBA elective at Kellogg and is a recipient of the Sidney J. Levy Teaching Award.
- Social Stigma
- Morality
- Health Decision-making
- Emotions
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The Saroj & Vithala Rao Young Scholar Award, Cornell University
Society for Consumer Psychology Dissertation Proposal Award, Winner
Sidney J. Levy Teaching Award, Kellogg Graduate School of Management -
Editorial Board, Journal of Consumer Psychology, 2025
Referee, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2024
Referee, Journal of Marketing Research, 2023
Referee, Journal of Consumer Research, 2022
Referee, Journal of Association of Consumer Research, 2021
Editorial Board, Marketing Letters, 2021
Referee, Journal of Consumer Psychology, 2019-2020
Referee, Motivation and Emotion, 2019-2020
Referee, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 2020
Special Topics in Consumer Research (MKTG-540-0)
This course introduces students to new topics and approaches in consumer behavior research. As such, the topics will change from year to year, and students will be challenged to further develop the theoretical model proposed in the papers. Besides being relevant to marketing students, this course is likely of interest to graduate students in psychology, communication studies and education.
Field Study (MKTG-498-5)
Field Study
Field Study (MKTG-498-0)
Field Studies include those opportunities outside of the regular curriculum in which a student is working with an outside company or non-profit organization to address a real-world business challenge for course credit under the oversight of a faculty member.
Marketing Research and Analytics (MKTG-450-0)
The objective of this course is to provide a fundamental understanding of marketing research methods employed by well-managed firms. The course focuses on research design, sampling, data collection, and data analysis to extract the most valuable information. Throughout the course, we examine the proper use of statistical analyses with an emphasis on the interpretation and use of results. Students work individually and in assigned teams to learn appropriate utilization of marketing research techniques to solve business problems. As experiential learning, teams will work on a capstone market research project for a client.
