Professor of Marketing | Consumer Behavior Researcher
Dr. James Leonhardt is a marketing professor at the University of Nevada, Reno whose research focuses on consumer behavior, persuasion, and how marketing messages shape decision-making.
His work examines how people form beliefs about products, brands, and social behaviors — and how advertising and cultural messaging influence those beliefs, often without people realizing it.
Dr. Leonhardt’s research explores topics such as social signaling, identity-based marketing, and the psychological mechanisms that make certain messages especially persuasive. His work has been published in leading academic journals and contributes to a broader understanding of how marketing shapes the choices people make in everyday life.
In the context of alcohol, his research helps explain why drinking is so closely tied to ideas of identity, belonging, and social status. Alcohol advertising rarely focuses on the product itself; instead, it sells a vision of who someone can become by drinking — more confident, more attractive, more accepted by their peers.
This kind of messaging can be extraordinarily powerful because it taps into fundamental human motivations around social belonging and self-image.
In Please Drink Responsibly, Dr. Leonhardt helps unpack the marketing strategies behind alcohol advertising and why those messages are so effective at shaping how people think about drinking — often long before they ever consciously question it.
Learn More:
https://www.unr.edu/business/faculty-and-staff/leonhardt-james
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=GFW_qpIAAAAJ&hl=en