Talkin’ with teachers: Indiana University’s Kate Christensen

Nostalgia. It influences everything from the latest clothing trends to the shows we watch to the food we eat.

Kate Christensen, assistant professor of marketing at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business, has studied the impact of “heritage goods”—objects tied to someone’s past—on consumer behavior.

We chatted with her to discuss her research on heritage connection, her career, and what it’s like to teach marketing.

Could you talk about how you ended up becoming a professor of marketing?

I was working in the entertainment industry. I was working in the Internet Group at the Walt Disney Company, and I thought it would be fun to do an MBA. I had some friends there who had done one, and the company wanted to fund part of that. I ended up doing an MBA at UCLA Anderson while I was working at Disney. While I was doing that MBA, I moved to Sony Pictures Television. Then, by the end of it, I decided I really had loved my experience and I wanted to do this forever.

You’ve done a lot of research around heritage connection. Is there a part of your work that you want to highlight?

Yes. There’s an express version of my work on heritage connection that just came out in the Journal of Marketing Research. That’s joint work with Suzanne Shu, who’s at the Cornell Johnson School of Management and was at UCLA when I was in grad school.

This is a project I really love. It started with a question that Suzanne asked. She said, “How do we get people to get rid of things?” It took me a year to give her an answer because I didn’t want to say anything until I thought it through.

During that time, I’d had my own issue with getting rid of things. The story for me started with my grandmother’s teacups. My mom one day brought over a bag of teacups, and she said, “Kate, these are your grandmother’s teacups.”

I kept them for a year, but I didn’t have any tea parties. I was moving, and sometimes we get rid of some things, so I got rid of a few of the teacups. I figured they didn’t match. I figured I would keep some of them as a memory and then get rid of the others. When my mom came over again, she knew. She said, “Kate, you sold your grandmother’s teacups.”

I hadn’t sold them; I’d given them away. I realized that I didn’t understand the value of these items, and that if I had understood that, I would have made a different decision. She had been able to give away the item because, for her, they had a heritage connection, and she wanted to give them to me, so that this past would be maintained. But for me, I didn’t know what the past was…This inspired this research for me, which was, “When do we give things away? When do we keep them? What are these goods worth to us? What is the past worth to us as human beings?”…This research has been very exciting. From a practical point of view, it suggests that if you want to get a discount on something that has a connection to the past, you may think that you should hide your interest from the seller, because [if you don’t], they will then perceive that you value it more. But in fact, what we find is that when sellers and buyers share this connection to the past—to the people that came before, traditions that matter—that they’ll actually sell a good for less when they perceive the buyer values it more.

What brand do you think is approaching marketing well right now?

Ukraine. I think [President] Zelensky has been able to galvanize international support for his country by working directly with marketers and ad agencies. He was at Cannes Lions. He’s been able to connect his people’s story to the history of Europe in a way that has driven support for his country in a very difficult time.

What do you think is challenging about teaching marketing?

One of the things that I think is challenging is that the job we do as researchers is very different from marketing. We do research. Our students are going to go out and be marketers. What we’re doing on a daily basis is very different from what they’ll be doing…I think there’s just this gap between who we are and who they will become. Now, for me, I have this experience in marketing. Even so, once you spend five years in a PhD program, and then you’re in academia, you get further away from it. The challenge for us teaching marketing, but also for anyone teaching anything, is empathy, trying to understand your students, and giving them a combination of what they want and what you think they need.