Dr. Cristina Galalae is an Associate Professor (Senior Lecturer) in Marketing at the Open University (UK) and a Senior Fellow of Higher Education. She held positions at Coventry University and at the University of Leicester in the UK, as well as at the University of Texas at Austin in the USA and the National School of Political Studies and Publica Administration in Romania. Cristina has completed her doctoral formative journey at the University of Texas at Austin (USA) as a Fulbright scholar, the University of Manchester (UK), as a European Social Fund grantee, and at the Bucharest Academy of Economics (Romania), which awarded her a Ph.D. in International Business in 2015.
Cristina’s research programme is positioned at the intersection of consumer behaviour, multicultural marketing, and critical diversity scholarship. Her work regularly features in recognized journals, such as the Journal of Business Research, Journal of Public Policy and Marketing, Consumption, Markets & Culture, European Journal of Marketing, edited collections and international conferences. Cristina’s contribution to marketing research has been honoured with awards such as the Women in Marketing Scientist Award offered by the Women in Marketing Association and the Thomas C. Kinnear Award offered by the American Marketing Association. Cristina is proud to serve the marketing research community as an Associate Editor for the Journal of Marketing Management and a board member of the Qualitative Market Research Journal.

Keynote speech – Diversity, equity and inclusion in marketing: were we too late or too early to the party?
Many societies are becoming more culturally diverse and more consumption centric. Nevertheless, people of different cultural characteristics (e.g., race, ethnicity, age, migration status, ability levels, sexual orientation etc.) often experience exclusion, restriction, and mistreatment in the marketplace. Over the past two decades, various brands made efforts to become more inclusive across their marketing mix, most notably visible in their marketing communications. However, in very recent times we have observed a backlash against diversity, equity and inclusion policies in various countries – at individual, organisational and at societal level. Drawing on my published and ongoing research, in this talk I will problematize questions such as: What does the future hold for inclusive marketing? What changes are needed so that consumers are equally treated in the marketplace, without exclusion, restriction, or mistreatment? How can marketing researchers contribute to these changes via their work? This talk is an invitation to reflect on how marketing practitioners and researchers can collectively contribute to more inclusive markets and societies.