Rate My Professor Sarah Xiao

Professor Sarah Xiao is Professor of Marketing in the Business & Economics faculty at the University of Durham's Business School, where she serves as Head of the Department of Marketing and International Business. As a consumer psychologist, her research focuses on the interactions between consumer behaviour, marketing, and technology in driving marketing innovation across retail, service, and tourism sectors. Over the past five years, she has concentrated on leveraging artificial intelligence to assist consumer decision-making, predict brand reputations, and company performance. She possesses expertise in consumer behaviour analysis, behaviour pattern analysis, impulse purchasing, customer journey mapping, and social media data analysis and interpretation. Her work has attracted significant research funding and contributed to marketing strategies of organisations from major international corporations to local SMEs. She regularly collaborates with colleagues worldwide and maintains organisational partners in private and public sectors.

Prior to her academic career at Durham University since 2006, Sarah Xiao had a professional background in marketing, business development, entrepreneurship, and as Managing Director in the IT sector. She is also Programme Director for the Doctorate in Business Administration (DBA) at Fudan University in China. Her research interests include behavioural change, consumer analytics (big data, AI, machine learning), consumer behaviour analysis, illicit consumption and consumer misbehaviour, neuroscience, marketing and consumer choice, mobile commerce, and social marketing especially within the context of health, digital marketing, and consumer data analytics. Key publications comprise 'Impulse buying: a meta-analytic review' (Iyer, G., Blut, M., Xiao, S., & Grewal, D., 2020, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science); 'When online reviews meet virtual reality: Effects on consumer hotel booking' (Zeng, G., Cao, X., Lin, Z., & Xiao, S., 2020, Annals of Tourism Research); 'Using social media big data for tourist demand forecasting: A new machine learning analytical approach' (Li, Y., Lin, Z., & Xiao, S., 2022, Journal of Digital Economy); 'Bilinear pooling in video-QA: empirical challenges and motivational drift from neurological parallels' (Winterbottom, T., Xiao, S., McLean, A., & Al Moubayed, N., 2022, PeerJ Computer Science); and 'From impression to expression: How warmth and competence in relaxing and challenging activities shape pleasure and eWOM' (Su, L., Wang, X., Lin, Z., & Xiao, S., 2025, Psychology & Marketing).