Associate Professor in the Department of Marketing & Supply Chain Management at North Carolina Agricultural & Technical State University
About
Roland Leak is an associate professor of marketing at North Carolina A&T State University in Greensboro, NC. His focal teaching areas are consumer behavior and marketing strategy, and his corresponding research focuses on the following content areas affecting consumer behavior: intra-ethnic stereotyping (i.e., how members of one ethnic group - particularly minorities - stereotype in-group members), phenotypicality bias (among things, skin tone biases), and ideology (e.g., conservativism, ethnic color blindness, nationalism).
Current Work:
Dr. Leak's scholarship focuses on how the many different aspects of race - particularly in the US - informs and guides consumer decision making processes. This artificially created societal construct truly carries so much weight on how individuals grow, think, and make sometimes life shaping decisions. This decision making trickles down to individual consumerism.
His current and past projects have focused on how consumers of different races react to historical imagery that would now generally be considered racist (e.g., Aunt Jemima), consumer reactions to racial caricatures that represent sports teams, and consumer preferences on models that have different skin tones that represent aggressive vs. sincere brands. Dr. Leak's research also delves into how past discrimination can shape future marketplace actions, and how consumers react to corporate management making seemingly insensitive comments that have nothing to do with the brands they control (e.g., race/sexual orientation).
Research Area(s):
- stereotype; race; ethnicity; identity; ideology
