Fosters collaboration and teamwork.
James Leonhardt serves as the Phil and Jennifer Satre Professor of Marketing and a Professor of Marketing within the Business & Economics faculty at the University of Nevada, Reno's College of Business. He earned his Ph.D. from the Paul Merage School of Business at the University of California, Irvine, and his B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley. Additionally, he studied at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development and holds Teaching Marketing Analytics and Digital Marketing Education certificates from the Academy of Marketing Science. Affiliated with the Ozmen Institute for Global Studies, Leonhardt has served as a Visiting Scholar at the SGH Warsaw School of Economics and Adolfo Ibáñez University. His research has received support through grants from the Harold and Muriel Berkman Charitable Foundation and the Ozmen Institute for Global Studies. He serves on the editorial boards of several academic journals and the Scientific Council for Przeglad Organizacji, and consults with international organizations on innovation and entrepreneurship.
Dr. Leonhardt specializes in consumer behavior research, focusing on cross-cultural consumer information processing via interdisciplinary, multi-method approaches to inform marketing strategies in health, sustainability, and public policy. His studies reveal how information presentation influences feelings, thoughts, and behaviors, including linguistic features like second-person pronouns, negations, and certainty expressions in social media that affect engagement with cross-cultural differences. Other work examines brand naming, product imagery, online reviews, labeling, environmental messaging, and health probabilities impacting outcomes such as word-of-mouth, willingness-to-pay, brand trust, recycling, and prosocial decisions. Key publications include Liu, H., Perera, S., Wang, J., & Leonhardt, J. M. (2023). Physician engagement in online medical teams: A multilevel investigation. Journal of Business Research; Pezzuti, T. & Leonhardt, J. M. (2022). What’s not to like? Negations in brand messages increase consumer engagement. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science; LaBarge et al. (2022). Digital exchange compromises: Teetering priorities of consumers, organizations at the Iron Triangle. Journal of Consumer Affairs; Leonhardt et al. (2021). Invincibility threatens vaccination intentions during a pandemic. PLoS ONE; Leonhardt, J. M. & Pechmann, C. (2021). Is this product easy to control? Liabilities of using difficult-to-pronounce product names. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes; and Pezzuti, T., Leonhardt, J. M., & Warren, C. (2021). Certainty in language increases engagement on social media. Journal of Interactive Marketing. His scholarship appears in leading journals and has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, US News, and Medscape. Leonhardt teaches Integrated Marketing Communications, Advanced Digital Marketing seminars, Consumer Behavior, and others, authors marketing ethics materials, and supervises student projects. Awards include the Willem Houwink Memorial Award for Teaching Excellence (2020), College of Business Excellence in Teaching Award (2019), Phil & Jennifer Satre Endowed Professorship (2023), and Dean’s Research Professor Award (2021-2023).
