Meet Paolo Antonetti, a Professor putting emotions at the heart of a quest for sustainable marketing

That initial question became a research agenda. During his PhD, which he completed in 2013 (1), Paolo chose to study moral emotions—guilt and pride—and their role in sustainable consumption, convinced that persuasion tactics rooted only in rational information rarely change behaviour. But stories and feelings do, especially when people experience their choices as “right” or “wrong”. His PhD thesis, “The role of guilt and pride in consumers' self-regulation: an exploration on sustainability and ethical consumption” (1), set that tone and framed much of his later work.

Since then, that line of inquiry has broadened into practical questions for managers and consumers: how do people act on various emotions with their wallets? How do moral emotions travel through campaigns, apologies, and policies, and what kind of messages help people act on what they believe is right? From the spectrum of anger expressed at corporations, to animosity amid international political crises, and moral outrage in the face of corporate irresponsibility, his work crosses disciplinary and geographical borders and appears in outlets within and beyond marketing.

In recent years, he has focused on what happens when things go wrong: service failures, corporate crises, and the fraught communications that follow. His latest papers examine why some organisations claim victimhood after a cyberattack (2), the ethics and effectiveness of blame-shifting (3), how apologies can become more credible when firms signal lower competence (4), or the wide palette of negative emotions expressed during a crisis and how organisations can attempt to mitigate them (5).

Paolo’s take is both inspiring and pragmatic. “Emotions make life interesting, that’s how people make sense of the world around them”. His work shows how emotion and ethics intertwine. The result is a body of research that gives managers—and future leaders—a vocabulary and a blueprint for making better choices under pressure. The academic community is also well aware of this, as Paolo's research is widely visible and cited, placing him this year for the first time in the top 2% of the world's most cited scientists (6).

The teacher in him follows the same balance between pragmatism and inspiration. Although he candidly remembers the fatigue of early-career classes and the puzzle of mixed motivation among students, over time, the classroom turned into a source of meaning. Today, he invites students to bring their own values into the discussion and to test the fairness of everyday marketing practices. In his interactive lectures on sustainability and ethics, he pushes his audience to move beyond “whatever works” and to articulate why something is right or not. “I get a lot of positive energy from teaching,” he says, a counterweight to the solitary hours of research.

Borrowing from American columnist David Brooks, he often contrasts the “résumé virtues”—the skills that bring external validation—with the “eulogy virtues”—the qualities people remember when you’re gone. “Brooks argues that in modern institutions we tend to spend too much time on the former and too little on the latter,” he explains. For Paolo, who tries to bring that idea into his practice, teaching belongs to that second list—the one that shapes character and defines one’s overall sense of usefulness.

His move to EDHEC in September 2024 capped a decade-plus arc that began with his PhD and ran through posts at Warwick, Queen Mary, and Neoma. He says he found at EDHEC a collaborative culture that felt tangible, where scholars learn from one another and there is space for everyday conversations that sharpen ideas. 

His collaborative mindset goes way beyond the walls of EDHEC: Paolo is Section Editor for the Journal of Business Ethics, a role that has earned him an Editor of Distinction award from Springer Nature in 2025 for the support given to authors and the handling of the review process.

Parallel to this professional evolution is a more personal arc. Born and educated in Italy, after spending ten years in the UK, Paolo is now settled in France. Throughout he has repeatedly chosen the path of personal growth when the work called for it—switching countries, learning new languages, and reshaping his research as fresh questions emerged. 

Raised in a family of small entrepreneurs—his father is an accountant—and with no tradition of advanced degrees or academia, he did not set out with grand plans but rather seized opportunities. “If you feel something is not working, then try something different,” he summarises with a smile. That appetite for renewal now feeds his next challenge: adding more normative writing to his portfolio—not just analysing what firms do but arguing what they should do.

Through it all, the focus on emotions remains central. He never warmed to purely cognitive models: real people, he insists, are shaped by their emotions and act on feelings. This gives marketing professionals a sense of responsibility: “As marketing practitioners and scholars, I don’t think there are many other ways of fixing the problems we face than becoming more aware of the ethical implications of everything we do”, he proposes. 

Marketing, in this view, shapes social conversations; it is a public language with consequences. Paolo wants to improve its grammar, so that what works and what’s right can always be in the same sentence. Not bad for someone with no “grand plan”!

Key dates

Since 2024: Full Professor of Marketing, EDHEC Business School (France).

Since 2020: Visiting Professor of Marketing, University of Lucerne (Switzerland).

2018–2024: Full Professor of Marketing, NEOMA Business School (France).

2015–2018: Associate Professor of Marketing, Queen Mary University of London (UK).

2013–2015: Assistant Professor of Marketing, Warwick Business School, University of Warwick (UK).

2010–2013: PhD in Management, Cranfield School of Management, Cranfield University (UK).

2009–2010: Master’s in Management Research, Cranfield School of Management (UK).

2008–2009: Master’s in Strategic Marketing, Cranfield School of Management (UK).

2000–2004: Bachelor’s in Economics and Management for Arts, Culture and Communication, Bocconi University (Italy).

To know more about Paolo Antonetti

• Visit his personal page on edhec.edu
• Go to his Google Scholar profile
• See his Linkedin profile

References and selected recent publications

(1) The role of guilt and pride in consumers' self-regulation: an exploration on sustainability and ethical consumption (2013) - https://dspace.lib.cranfield.ac.uk/items/c5a20cb3-df70-4aa6-9ffe-12766b7ffb2f

(2) Antonetti, P. & Baghi, I. “Responding to cyberattacks by claiming victimhood,” Journal of Service Research, 28 (3), 434-450 (2025) - https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/10946705241271337

See also EDHEC Vox / The Conversation "Cyberattacks: how companies can communicate effectively after being hit" (April 2025) - https://www.edhec.edu/en/research-and-faculty/edhec-vox/cyberattacks-how-companies-can-communicate-effectively-after-being-hit

(3) Antonetti, P. & Baghi, I. “Acceptable finger-pointing: How evaluators judge (or ignore) the ethicality of blame-shifting,” European Management Review, 21 (4), 902-920 (2024) - https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/emre.12678

(4) Antonetti, P. & Baghi, I. “Projecting lower competence to boost an apology’s effectiveness: explanatory mechanism and boundary conditions” Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 51, 695–715 (2023) - https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11747-022-00903-5

(5) Antonetti, P. & Valor, C. “Mitigating moral emotions after crises: a reconceptualization of organizational responses”, Journal of Business Ethics, forthcoming (2025) - https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10551-025-06042-5

(6) See https://topresearcherslist.com/. For 2025, along with Paoli Antonetti, 4 other EDHEC professors are present in this ranking: Sachin Kamble, Martin Wetzels, René Rohrbeck and Philippe du Jardin