Dr Gillian Brooks is a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) of Marketing at King’s Business School. She is a leading expert in the fields of influencer marketing, consumer culture and social media.

Trained as a sociologist, Gillian investigates core topics in consumer behaviour, social media and digital marketing strategy primarily through qualitative research methods (e.g., ethnography, participant observation, interviews and content analysis). Gillian’s research has been published the Journal of Advertising, Forbes, The Guardian, the Journal of Marketing, Newsweek, The Telegraph, The Times, and The Washington Post.

She won the American Marketing Association Marketing Research SIG Don Lehmann Award and is the recipient of a Marketing Science Institute research grant. Gillian is part of an interdisciplinary research team (along with the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, King’s College London) examining youth mental health research via social media influencer marketing; the team was awarded a £1.1 million grant from U.K. Research and Innovation to pursue this research.

Prior to entering academia, Gillian worked as a publicist at a global media relations firm in Toronto, Canada.