Julien Cayla is an Associate Professor of Marketing at Nanyang Business School. He is also a visiting Professor at Kedge Business School and a Research Area Advisor at IIM Udaipur.

He is passionate about bringing anthropological theories and methods to study consumer culture phenomena. He is excited about the idea of a consumer culture lab in India since he has always believed that more anthropologically-oriented approaches could benefit a wide range of people and organizations in India including government, companies and students.

These days he is mostly interested in the growth of the service economy, and the pains and pleasures of interacting with customers. He wonders how we can make such interactions more meaningful and less painful. The research question he is currently focusing on is: Why and how do service interactions vary across cultural contexts?

He is especially interested in understanding what “good service” means to the organizations that do service work, and how these ideas about service are put into practice in interactions with customers. To address this question, his team of co-authors and him have been working with and observing the personnel of a global hotel chain in different countries. The insights they generate through participant observation help extend marketing scholarship by detailing the specific ways culture frames service interactions. They are currently working on several papers in this area that have the potential of changing the way we think about service, especially the impact of culture on service.