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Meet Yenee Kim, an Assistant Professor of Marketing who turns everyday curiosity into experiments on consumer behaviour

Yenee Kim , Assistant Professor
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Yenee Kim tried not to become an academic. She chose economics, went into the “real world”, and kept a careful distance from the scholarly path her father had predicted for her. But while others were watching numbers move, she was wondering why people moved them. That question drove her into the welcoming arms of consumer behaviour, then marketing, then research — but always on her own terms...

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16 Jun 2026
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Becoming a marketing scholar wasn’t in the cards for Yenee Kim. At least not in the deck she thought she would play with. “After my bachelor’s, I was working in a stock firm”, she recalls, “facilitating clients in selling and buying stocks.” Around her, colleagues were interested in performance, timing, gains, and commissions. 

Yenee, however, found herself drawn to a different question: why is a client selling now? Why buy this stock, at this moment? “I was less concerned about how much money or profit we were making,” she says. “I was more interested in the underlying reasoning or motivations.” She eventually put a name on that reflex: consumer behaviour.

 

That’s when marketing came onto her radar. Yenee had studied Economics and Finance, partly because she liked numbers, partly because it opened many doors, and partly, she admits, because she did not want to follow too neatly in her father’s footsteps. A natural scientist and an academic — who published in Nature during his 3rd year of PhD, talk about setting the bar high — he had long suspected she might end up doing a PhD. But Yenee had other ambitions, or rather, she did not want to touch that one with a ten-foot pole. “I’m not going to be an academic,” she remembers thinking. “I’m going to work in the real world.”

 

First came a master’s degree in marketing — completed in 2015 and focused on consumer behaviour — and a thesis that changed her trajectory. The topic was conspicuous consumption: how people may turn to visible status symbols when they feel psychologically threatened by comparison with others. Looking back, she laughs at the roughness of the early work, the unpolished experiments, the Photoshopped pictures. 

But she also remembers that she loved the process. Designing the experiment, analysing the results, conducting the statistical tests, reviewing the literature, and building a logical argument to support a hypothesis. Despite her best efforts, she instantly loved research.

 

So, she went for a PhD.

Not in South Korea, where she was born and later studied, and not in the United States, where she had grown up from the age of three, but in Europe. ESSEC Business School became her home until 2020 when she defended her PhD dissertation. In it, she explored a key question: when a salesperson speaks to a customer, what kind of message actually helps?

 

This became one of her many interests. She is the first to admit that her research does not fit under one perfectly branded umbrella. “I was a bit worried about how I was going to explain my research topics,” she says, laughing. “They’re a bit all over the place.” The topics vary, yes, but her questioning is consistent. 

Yenee studies the small cues that shape consumer decisions: a salesperson’s phrasing, a store’s spatial layout, a brand’s tone, a shopping goal, a customer’s level of expertise, the friction or fluency of the decision process. Her work looks at how people process information in real commercial situations, and how companies can communicate in ways that are more useful, more relevant and ultimately more effective.

 

EDHEC has given her room to explore that diversity. She joined the school in 2020, a challenging moment to start a first faculty position. Like many young academics, she had to learn how to teach, design courses and find her place in a new institution while the pandemic was rewriting everyone’s routines. 

The first year meant online classes, redesigned activities, and fewer of the casual hallway conversations through which junior faculty often learn how things work. She jokes that, in her second year, a student once asked her where the auditorium was and she thought: “We have an auditorium?!”

Still, she found at EDHEC the kind of freedom she seems to value the most: the freedom to research different topics, to shape her courses, and to learn from colleagues. She also discovered that teaching could be more than a duty attached to academic life. “Teaching is quite fun too,” she says. “It’s a nice shift from research, which can be a lonely job.” In the classroom, she likes the interaction, the questions, the moments when students challenge her and she challenges them back.

 

She also brings experimentation into teaching, sometimes quite literally. In one course, she compared attendance sheets with and without printed eyes to see whether the sense of being watched would change students’ behaviour. At the end, she revealed the small experiment and discussed the results with them. Experiments, she wanted them to see, are not remote or intimidating. They can begin with a small observation, a playful question, a situation that everyone understands but deserves further inspection. It doesn’t have to be more than an initial spark to become something.


Although she hasn’t defined it herself yet, Yenee’s academic style has already materialized rather clearly: rigorous but allergic to pomposity; energetic but not fixated in personal branding; serious but also keen on not being boring. Her work has already found its way into highly regarded journals, including the FT50-listed Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science and the three-star Psychology & Marketing. 

Still, she is interested in another kind of scholarly achievement: writing a signature paper that people remember not only because it is insightful or well published, but because it is witty and thought-provoking. “I think research is really fun,” she says. “Some papers are boring, some are interesting, some make you think, and others contribute to the literature. But few manage to also make you chuckle, to strike the right balance. That makes it memorable.” 

 

Her father, it turns out, may have been right about the PhD. But he could not have predicted the kind of academic she would become: one who started with numbers in the financial business world, wandered into consumer behaviour, resisted a single narrow label to follow her natural curiosity, and started her research life by asking why people choose, buy, browse, perceive, hesitate or click. In the end, Yenee Kim did become an academic. She just did it on her own terms.

Key dates

Since 2020: Assistant Professor of Marketing, EDHEC Business School, France

2020: PhD in Marketing, ESSEC Business School / CY Cergy Paris Université, France

2017: Master of Research in Business Administration, ESSEC Business School, France

2015: M.S. in Marketing, Seoul National University, South Korea

To learn more about Yenee Kim and her research

Selection of publications