Marketing has long prided itself on understanding consumers. But according to an award-winning paper by Esther Uduehi, the field may have been looking through too narrow a lens to see the full picture. 

That argument is the heart of “Intersectionality in Marketing: A Paradigm for Understanding Understudied Consumers,” co-authored by Uduehi, assistant professor of marketing and international business at the University of Washington Foster School of Business; Julian K. Saint Clair, a Foster School PhD now at Loyola Marymount University; and Rowena Crabbe of the University of Texas at Austin. 

The paper has now earned one of the field’s highest recognitions: the Shelby D. Hunt/Harold H. Maynard Award, given annually by the American Marketing Association to the Journal of Marketing paper that makes the most significant contribution to marketing theory.

“I really call it a community win,” Uduehi says, “because it required a whole community of work and thinking and building to get to this point.”

Saint Clair echoes that acknowledgment, expressing particular gratitude to Dr. Thaddeus Spratlen and Dr. William Bradford, Foster’s first African American professor and first African American dean, respectively.

“Without trailblazers like them, we wouldn’t have had the critical foundation to do this kind of work,” he says. “This award belongs to that whole tradition of scholars who push the field to ask harder questions.”

The award holds additional significance for Uduehi. Theory papers are rarely attempted early in a career — they are notoriously difficult to publish — which means the award typically goes to more senior scholars. She received it in her fifth year as a faculty member at Foster.

“The reality is, there isn’t a more important award I could win for any paper,” Uduehi says. “Winning is sort of unimaginable, and it makes you want to make sure the door stays open for the people coming behind you.”

A framework that centers lived experience

The paper’s central argument challenges the dominant logic of marketing research, which tends to treat consumer identity, such as race, gender, class, and sexuality, as factors that might modify a finding rather than as forces that fundamentally shape consumer experience. The current paradigm, the authors argue, assumes a largely linear relationship between theoretical constructs and marketing outcomes, treating lived experience as peripheral.

An intersectional approach asks marketing to think differently. Uduehi explains that intersectionality places consumer lived experience on the same level as theoretical constructs and marketing outcomes — not as a modifier, but as a defining force.

“An intersectional framework allows you to say that the consumer lived experience lives in concert with the theoretical constructs and marketing outcomes — and they all inform each other,” she says. “So instead of a linear relationship, it’s a circular relationship. And what lives at the center of that is power.”

The paper translates that shift into a conceptual framework, research design roadmap, research agenda, and practical guidance to help researchers, educators, and business leaders ask more precise questions about consumers.

“For me, the most important contribution of this paper is shifting the lens of marketing to focus on how identity and power come together to shape every aspect of consumers’ lived experiences,” Saint Clair says.

What researchers and marketers miss when they chase generalizability

One reason intersectionality has remained underutilized, Uduehi says, is the field’s emphasis on generalizability — the drive to identify mechanisms that hold across populations. That impulse has real scientific value. But who gets studied is often shaped more by accessibility than by design, and conclusions drawn from narrow samples are frequently applied much more broadly.

For researchers and marketers, that distinction matters: Research that appears broadly applicable can still miss the specific consumers, contexts, and power dynamics shaping real marketplace behavior. In practice, Uduehi says, that can leave researchers with only general answers when businesses come looking for insight into specific consumer groups.

“The field would need to take seriously the idea of studying consumers for who they are and what makes them different,” Uduehi says, “and not what makes them all the same.”

The gap shows up in the data. A literature review conducted for the paper found that only 8.4% of experiment-based articles in the Journal of Consumer Research from 2018 to 2021 report participants’ race, while more than 94% report participants’ gender and age. The intersections most closely tied to social hierarchy — race, class, sexuality — often remain hidden in the research record, even as researchers make broad claims.

Uduehi offers a concrete example to illustrate the point: Marketing research often treats political identity as a monolith — assuming, for example, that a conservative is a conservative. But what does it mean, she asks, to be a Black conservative? Does that person engage with the political marketplace the same way as a white conservative, even when voting the same way?

“Just because you’re studying one construct doesn’t mean you’re studying the entirety of its meaning within the lived experience,” she says.

For researchers and marketers, the takeaway is not simply to add more demographic variables, but to ask whether the categories they rely on capture how consumers actually experience the marketplace.

Opening the door to better questions

For emerging scholars, Uduehi sees the paper as more than a framework. It’s permission.

“There are people that are wanting to ask these questions, but they’re being told they can’t,” she says.

The paper offers theoretical and methodological grounding for researchers to pursue intersectional questions rigorously, including earlier in their careers, rather than deferring to the conventional wisdom that theory papers are for later.

“I hope that the tools we provide help researchers, practitioners, and other stakeholders meaningfully engage with intersectionality in marketing, because doing so can lead to synergistic win-win relationships rather than unsustainable exploitation,” Saint Clair says.

For Uduehi, the award validates a difficult journey. The paper was rejected before it found its home in the Journal of Marketing, and there were moments, she says, when she nearly walked away from it.

“There are many times I was going to give up,” she says. “I’m grateful for the people who continued to encourage us along the way.”

Read the paper: “Intersectionality in Marketing: A Paradigm for Understanding Understudied Consumers” — Esther Uduehi, Julian K. Saint Clair, and Rowena Crabbe. Published in the Journal of Marketing (2025).

Esther Uduehi is an Assistant Professor of Marketing and International Business at the Foster School of Business.