Hilke Plassmann

Hilke Plassmann is INSEAD's Octapharma Chaired Professor of Decision Neuroscience and Professor of Marketing at INSEAD. She joined INSEAD in September 2008. She is a Principal Investigator in the Control-Interoception-Attention Team at the Paris Brain Institute (ICM) of Sorbonne University under the umbrella of the Sorbonne Alliance. Before joining the Paris Brain Institute Hilke was an Affiliated Faculty at the Cognitive Neuroscience Unit of the Ecole Normale Superieure. She has been a visiting faculty at the Wharton School, NYU's Stern School of Business, the Rady School of Management at the University of California at San Diego and Bonn University. In 2005, she earned a PhD in Marketing and Neuroscience (Dr.rer.pol) from the University of Münster´s School of Business and Economics, and then was a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University and the California Institute of Technology.

Hilke is one of the pioneers in the nascent field of decision and consumer neuroscience. Her primary research areas are consumer decision-making and its strategic marketing implications at the intersection of neuroscience, psychology, and economics

Hilke is broadly interested in why consumers sometimes make decision that are bad for them – for their physical and mental health, their wallet, or the planet. Most of her research investigates the role of individual differences in consumer’s neurobiology to better understand why they make such disadvantageous decisions.

Her research has appeared in leading academic journals such as the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, Nature Communications, Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Consumer Psychology and Journal of Neuroscience.

Her work has received international newspaper, radio, and TV coverage by, among others, CNN, ABC News, Fox News, Arte, Galileo, National Public Radio, The New York Times, The Economist, The New Yorker, Science Magazine, Scientific American, Harvard Business Review, Focus, Spiegel, and Absatzwirtschaft.

Hilke has written several award-winning cases and has worked with several large companies and start-ups. At INSEAD, Hilke teaches customer value management, behavioral and brain science for behavioral change, and neuromarketing in the different programs that INSEAD offers. She co-directs the Business Foundations Certificate (BFC) Programme at INSEAD and several Executive Programs.