Tito Grillo, PhD, University of Texas at Austin

Area of Study / Keywords

Consumer Psychology Analytical Methods

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Research

Theoretical interests

I tend to see consumer behavior as the interplay between things people learned while growing up, things humans are hardwired to do, and the stimuli they find while navigating our modern world. In general, behavioral tendencies are very functional—we systematically adopt behaviors that have been rewarded while we were growing up, and our most fundamental natural tendencies tend to exist because they helped our ancestors survive.

The twist is that many of the modern world stimuli—such as money, technology, political discussions, and social tensions—were neither part of people’s formative experiences nor the lives of our ancestors. I try to understand what happens when early-learned and “primitive” tendencies confront modern, “grown-up” challenges.

Substantive interests

The modern world sucks!!! People worldwide face brutal battles every day, from poverty to discrimination to political tensions. I am interested in understanding these battles, how people navigate them, and how they impact people.

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Teaching

Currently teaching Advanced Marketing Analytics (6-week lab-based course focused on data wrangling and drinking coffee).

Upcoming (2025):

Marketing Analytics (Winter): Undergraduate level course focused on the relevant methodological aspects of data analysis in marketing. Topics covered include data collection methods such as experiments, statistical modeling such as different types of regression, and algorithms employed to analyze consumer data such as decision trees and clustering techniques.

Advanced Marketing Analytics (Spring, 6 weeks): No lectures in this undergraduate level course, only hands-on problem-solving. Basically, each class involves new data and a set of challenges for us to solve. Students also receive a budget to conduct and analyze their own experiments during the course. Classes may involve going to coffee shops and ordering pizza. Limited spots.

Research Methodology in Marketing (Winter): PhD seminar on quantitative methods employed in academic research in marketing and consumer psychology.

All my courses involve learning and practicing techniques employed to analyze quantitative data and use R as the primary data analysis software. Other coding software (e.g., Python, Stata) can also be used and students are more than welcome to use them in class if they prefer them over R. Menu-based software like SPSS are not recommended.

MARK 312 - Marketing Analytics

Students are introduced to the scientific process of transforming data into insight for making better marketing decisions. Topics include: data-driven problem solving; design of surveys, focus groups, and experiments; analytical techniques for primary, secondary, and qualitative data; and machine learning basics. The course is taught as an end-to-end process, starting from problem framing, data collection, method selection, model building, and deployment. Applies Excel and open-source data analysis software. Advanced students can build on this course to prepare for taking the INFORMS CAP (Certified Analytics Professional) Exam. Prerequisite: MARK 301.

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MARK 495 - Individual Research Project I

Special study for advanced undergraduates. Prerequisites: MARK 312 or equivalent, consent of Instructor and Associate Dean Undergraduate Program.

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MARK 710 - Research Methodology in Marketing

The nature of scientific inquiry and its relevance and application to research in marketing. The development and testing of marketing theory. Marketing measurement methodology. Prerequisites: Registration in the Business PhD Program or permission of instructor. Approval of the Business PhD Program Director is also required for non-PhD students. Students may not receive credit for both MARK 701 and 710.

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Browse more courses taught by Tito Grillo

Tito L.H. Grillo, Shuhan Yang, Adrian F. Ward

Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. 2024 September; 115 10.1016/j.jesp.2024.104671

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Tito L.H. Grillo, Adrian F. Ward

Journal of the Association for Consumer Research. 2022 January; 7 (1):54-62 10.1086/711833

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Tito L. H. Grillo, Cristiane Pizzutti

Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. 2021 May; 47 (5):796-809 10.1177/0146167220946197

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Matthew Fisher, Adam H. Smiley, Tito L.H. Grillo

Memory. 2021 February; 30 (4):375-387 10.1080/09658211.2021.1882501