Elanor (Nora) Williams, Associate Professor of Marketing
“I found Professor Williams’ class interesting, engaging, and helpful in covering all the different aspects of how we as consumers make decisions and how to position our offering to the consumers.
My favorite part of the class was that she had us apply the principles we learned by helping a local non-profit with a consumer behavior problem. My group worked with Beyond Housing, and we discussed ways to use word-of-mouth, nudges, and some of the consumer behavior theories we’d covered in class to improve their messaging to key campaign stakeholders. I loved that we were able to solidify better what we learned, and help make a difference for St. Louis at the same time.” Amanda Honigfort MBA, 2023
“MKT 576A was a really valuable class, one of the more valuable I have taken at Olin. Nora is an engaging, funny, and insightful professor and really elevated the material. So much of what I learned in that class resonated with me at the time and has stuck with me in the months since. I asked Nora on the last day of class if she had any other course offerings and I was disappointed to learn that she didn’t at the time. I hope to be able to take other classes with her and I have recommended MKT 576A to so many people. Olin is lucky to have Nora as a member of the faculty.” Sarah Watson, PMBA
Nora Williams joined Washington University as a marketing professor at the Olin Business School in 2019. Nora has dedicated her career to researching consumer behavior and decision-making, mainly how people make judgments in social contexts. She’s studied questions as varied as whether consumers view enhancing products as enabling their own abilities but embellishing others’; whether people enjoy receiving practical gifts; when price transparency can actually seem unfair; and when hosts feel free to tailor a party to their own interests rather than their guests. Her work has been cited in The New York Times, National Public Radio, Time Magazine, and Harvard Business Review. When she isn’t teaching or doing research, she spends her time cooking and baking, having game nights with friends, petting her cat Hadley, and taking walks in Tower Grove Park. She is engaged to Mike, an editor at St. Louis Magazine, and can’t wait to marry him in June.
