Ulrike Gretzel

Ulrike Gretzel, PhD, is the senior research fellow at the USC Annenberg Center for Public Relations. She is currently the Director of Research at Netnografica, an innovative market research company that provides actionable insights by extracting meaning from online conversations.

Before joining Netnografica, Gretzel was a visiting professor of professional practice at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. Her previous academic appointments include Professor, UQ Business School, University of Queensland, Associate Professor of Marketing, University of Wollongong, and Associate Professor of Tourism, Texas A&M University. She has also taught social media and research-related courses at Colorado State University, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, IULM in Milan, Italy, and MODUL University in Vienna, Austria. She received her PhD in communications from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and holds a master’s degree in International Business from the Vienna University of Economics and Business.

Her research focuses on persuasion in human-technology interactions with an emphasis on credibility perceptions, information search and processing, electronic decision aids, smart technologies, online and social media marketing, adoption and use of technologies, as well as non-adoption and digital detox. Her research has explored diverse topics such as the detection of fake TripAdvisor reviews, the creation of persuasive interfaces for mobile apps, the phenomenon of selfie-taking, and humor co-creation in Chinese social media conversations.

Gretzel’s research has been funded by the US National Science Foundation, the Australian Research Council, the Hong Kong Research Council, the National Research Foundation of Korea, the US National Endowment for the Humanities, the US National Park Service, Parks Canada, TripAdvisor, the Bush Presidential Library and Museum, and national, regional and local tourism organizations in North America, Europe, Australia, and Asia.

She has published 69 peer-reviewed articles in major e-Commerce, tourism and marketing journals. She has co-edited two books on social media marketing and has co-authored a book on persuasive recommender systems published by Springer. She regularly assesses research for the governments of Switzerland, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Australia, and Italy and serves on the editorial boards of 20 academic journals. She is frequently acknowledged as one of the most-cited authors in the fields of tourism and persuasion and her work has been quoted in major news outlets such as the New York Times and The Australian.