Cornelia Pechmann

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Cornelia (Connie) Pechmann is an American marketing scholar and professor at the University of California, Irvine. She studies how advertising, product labeling, social media, and online communities influence what people think and do. She is well known for researching adolescents’ responses to pro- and anti-tobacco and drug advertising and for work on using social media to support health goals, including a Twitter-based smoking-cessation tool called Tweet2Quit.

Education
- B.A. in Psychology and Spanish from Bucknell University (1981)
- M.S. in General Psychology and M.B.A. in Marketing Management from Vanderbilt University (1985)
- Ph.D. in Marketing Management from Vanderbilt University (1988)

Career
- Taught briefly at California State University, Fullerton before joining UC Irvine’s Paul Merage School of Business in 1988
- Promoted to full professor in 2003
- Former editor-in-chief of the Journal of Consumer Psychology
- Worked with the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy on the National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign
- Recipient of the American Marketing Association’s Responsible Research in Marketing Award

Research highlights
- Explores how advertising, labeling, and media shape consumer behavior, including the role of social media and geographic information in marketing
- Studied adolescents’ responses to antismoking messages and how exposure to smoking in movies affects youth, finding that strong antismoking ads can reduce the appeal of smoking and can counteract movie effects
- Applies protection motivation theory to anti-smoking messaging, identifying which message themes best boost teens’ intentions not to smoke
- Investigates comparative advertising and its effects on attention, memory, and purchase intentions, with nuanced results for new versus established brands
- Emphasizes tailoring health-related ads to the target audience and testing for potential negative effects
- Researches online health communities and social media use, including the development and evaluation of Tweet2Quit, a Twitter-based smoking-cessation program that showed engaging and viable results in trials