Tito Grillo, PhD, University of Texas at Austin

Area of Study / Keywords

Consumer Psychology Marketing Analytical Methods

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Research

I tend to see consumer behavior as the interplay between things consumers learned while growing up, things that (as humans) consumers 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 (e.g., money, technology) are not part of consumers’ early life experiences, and certainly were not part of the lives of our ancestors. My research tries to understand what happens when old learned and “programmed” tendencies meet these new stimuli.

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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.

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