Research
Dr. Pugh studies the psychology behind consumer decisions — with particular attention to trust, culture, technology, fairness, and the systems that increasingly mediate marketplace behavior.
Behavioral Marketing Through Consumer Psychology
Dr. Pugh's research sits at the intersection of consumer psychology and marketing strategy. The unifying question is straightforward: why do consumers make the decisions they make, and how can a deeper understanding of those decisions make marketing more predictive, effective, and responsible?
His work examines consumer trust, algorithmic marketing, personalization, cultural context, perceived fairness, psychological safety, and market participation. These themes connect individual decision-making with the technologies and institutions that structure contemporary consumer experience.
DECODE — Cultural Determinants of Consumer Engagement in Digital Environments — is a major research program within this broader agenda, not the entirety of it.
Core Lens
Consumer psychology is the foundation. Behavioral marketing is the application.
This positioning keeps the research theoretically grounded while maintaining a clear home in marketing scholarship and marketing education.
Research Streams
Algorithmic Marketing & Consumer Trust
How consumers interpret personalization, targeting, recommendation systems, transparency, and algorithmic decision-making — and how those interpretations shape trust, avoidance, engagement, and brand response.
Behavioral Marketing & Consumer Decision-Making
How psychological processes, heuristics, identity, social context, and choice environments influence consumer behavior and how behavioral science can improve marketing strategy and experimentation.
Culture, Fairness & Consumer Experience
How culture, historical experience, perceived fairness, and psychological safety shape marketplace judgments, especially when consumers interact with automated and data-driven marketing systems.
Entrepreneurial & Market Participation
How trust, legitimacy, system familiarity, and consumer-market dynamics affect participation by first-generation founders and other entrepreneurs navigating modern marketing and business systems.
DECODE
The DECODE Framework examines how historical institutional distrust and cultural mistrust sensitivity shape post-exposure algorithmic trust among Black consumers, with downstream consequences for ad avoidance, purchase intention, and brand trust.
Randomized transparency and personalization conditions test when these effects strengthen or weaken, while perceived ratings are retained as manipulation checks and secondary analytical inputs.
Read the DECODE research agendaCurrent DECODE Pathway
Historical Institutional Distrust
Cultural Mistrust Sensitivity
Post-Exposure Algorithmic Trust
Ad Avoidance · Purchase Intention · Brand Trust
Research Collaboration
Dr. Pugh welcomes conversations with scholars working in consumer behavior, behavioral marketing, cultural psychology, algorithmic marketing, trust, fairness, and adjacent areas.
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