03 July 2026
Remembering Professor Giana M Eckhardt
It is with great sadness that we mark the passing of Professor Giana M Eckhardt.
Professor Eckhardt joined King’s Business School in 2021 as Professor of Marketing. She held a key leadership position as Vice Dean - Engagement & Executive Education, launching King’s Business School’s Executive MBA and guiding its emphasis on business leadership for a better world.
A graduate of the University of Connecticut with a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota, Professor Eckhardt’s career spanned Australia, the US and Europe and she was a leading expert in the field of consumer culture, behaviour, and ethics. Through her research and prolific international collaboration, she made an enormous contribution to the prestige and profile of our Department of Marketing.
Professor Eckhardt wrote on sustainability, branding, and the sharing economy, publishing extensively in journals such as Harvard Business Review, the Journal of Marketing, the Journal of Marketing Research, California Management Review, and the Journal of Consumer Research. She co-authored In Praise of Inconvenience (Princeton University Press, 2026), The Myth of the Ethical Consumer (Cambridge University Press) and co-edited the Handbook of the Sharing Economy (Edward Elgar).
Alongside her own research, Giana was tireless in her service to the global community of marketing scholars, serving as a co-chair of the Consumer Culture Theory conference, Associate Editor of Journal of Consumer Research, on the editorial review board of Journal of Marketing. In 2025 she was appointed Co-Editor of the Journal of Consumer Research with the ambition of developing the journal’s diversity and inclusiveness and to introducing new paper formats in order to be more responsive to emerging issues and trends.
Her research won awards from the Sheth Foundation and the Marketing Science Institute, and she received research grants from the Australian Research Council, the Marketing Science Institute, and the British Academy of Management. She presented her work at top institutions and conferences around the world, including at the United Nations CSR Global Forum, Brand Week, and the Global Women’s Forum.
Giana’s insight into current marketing issues and trends was much sought-out by the media, and she featured on numerous podcasts as well as in outlets such as The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, The Atlantic, Fortune, Vogue, Scientific American, the BBC, and on National Public Radio.
Professor Eckhardt’s PhD thesis was on Symbolic Consumption in China: Product Meaning and the Interdependent Self (2000) and her intellectual curiosity about other cultures was reflected in a love of travel frequently combined with important academic research.
Beyond her extraordinary scholarly achievements, Giana will be remembered with deep affection by her colleagues and students for her kindness, generosity and warmth. She had a remarkable gift for bringing people together by encouraging new research collaborations, supporting colleagues’ ideas and initiatives, as well as through the many friendships and networks she nurtured across King’s and the wider academic community. We will miss her enormously.