About

Cele Otnes is the Anthony J. Petullo Professor of Business Administration and head of the Department of Business Administration at the University of Illinois. She joined the faculty in 1990 and became department head in 2018. Her educational background includes a bachelor’s degree in English literature from Louisiana State University, an MA in advertising from the University of Texas at Austin, and a PhD in communications from the University of Tennessee. Her research explores how consumers participate in rituals such as gift-giving, holidays, and cultural celebrations at micro, macro, and marketplace levels. Otnes has held various academic positions and consulting roles, including positions at the Norwegian School of Business and Economics, Hallmark, Inc., and Hallmark Cards. Her scholarly work includes numerous publications on consumer rituals, marketplace icons, and cultural consumption, contributing significantly to understanding consumer behavior in cultural and ritual contexts.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Marketing
• Computer Science
• Business
• Data science
• Engineering ethics
• Epistemology
• Advertising
• Engineering
• Geography
• Archaeology
• Psychology
• Public relations

Selected publications

• Therapeutic Agentic Benefits and Communal Service Rituals

  2025-08-13

  book-chapterSenior author

  In times of crisis, consumers often seek ritualized experiences that enhance their physical and mental well-being. This research explores the concept of therapeutic agentic benefits (TABs), focusing on how a virtual Thai cooking class empowered participants and contributed to their well-being. Drawing on in-depth interviews with class participants, this study finds that previously established agentic benefits such as Regulation, Transcendence, Discovery, and Growth emerge in this context. In addition, it discusses two emerging categories of TABs among several that emerged in the cooking class: Bonding and Restoration. The chapter demonstrates how communal service rituals like online cooking classes can help consumers regain control, connect with others, and experience emotional restoration in times of crisis. This research therefore expands upon the understanding of agentic benefits by understanding how service providers can incorporate rituals to facilitate emotional and social benefits and offers insights for enhancing customer engagement and well-being in service experiences.

  PublisherDOI

• Defining and Delineating Mindful Gifting: A Review and Research Agenda

  Psychology and Marketing · 2025-08-14 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access

  ABSTRACT Gifting and mindful consumption have recently garnered scholarly attention as distinct domains of consumption. However, the limited research exploring their intersection restricts conceptual clarity on how to engage in mindful giving and receiving, and the implications it may have for sustainability and well‐being. This paper introduces the concept of mindful gifting and examines its implications from a consumer perspective. Building on Sheth et al.'s (2011) mindful‐consumption framework, we assert that mindful gifting entails givers and recipients considering the impact of their gifting behavior on SSE (self, society, and the environment) before, during, and after the gifting experience. It may manifest in attentiveness to the potential impact of gifts, in the care that gifts can symbolize and foster, and in temperance throughout the entire gifting process, to enhance the well‐being of all parties involved. To support this conceptualization, we conduct a scoping review that synthesizes the literature at the intersection between gifting and mindful consumption that examines: (1) caring awareness toward SSE; (2) managing tensions that arise between these various aspects of care; and (3) exploring strategies to exert gifting temperance. These insights offer a foundation for future gifting research on gifting as a sustainable and mindful consumption practice.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Leveraging Seinfeld to Understand the Norms of Failed Gift Exchange

  2025-08-13

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter mines the riches to be found in the popular television program Seinfeld specifically with respect to what it portrays in terms of failed gift exchanges. Four basic failure contexts are uncovered: dyadic failures, intimate friendship circle failures, broader social network failures, and consumer/provider failures. Analysis of the episodes under study reveals a specific type of norm failure associated with each context. For example, dyadic failures typically violate an intergenerational norm, as opposed to intimate friendship circle failures, which typically violate the norm of “outgifting”—or giving a gift to a recipient that is better than someone else’s gift from the social circle. Similarly, broader social context failures typically violate the regifting norm (or, the norm against regifting). Finally, consumer/provider failures typically violate outsourcing norms—or the giver’s use of a (typically unreliable) service provider to successfully carry out a gifted experience. It is hoped the insights from this chapter will illuminate future research on gift-giving norm violations.

  PublisherDOI

• Zowie, It’s a Zuri! Exploring Consumer Creativity Within a Virtual Fan Community

  2025-01-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Forms and Functions of Rituals in My Cousin Rachel

  2025-08-13

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Rituals permeate people’s lives, so it is unsurprising that authors often leverage them in constructing narratives in novels, films, and plays. Rituals can propel plots and illuminate characters’ proclivities and personalities. Engaging in rituals makes characters’ experiences characters resonant and realistic and may induce identification and empathy from readers/viewers. Many of the novels created by the popular and prolific author Daphne du Maurier feature a plethora of rituals at the micro (involving intimate others), meso (involving community members), and macro levels (reflecting traditions and norms of the culture). This chapter explores the roles of rituals in du Maurier’s acclaimed novel My Cousin Rachel, comparing their forms and functions in the 1951 novel with those in the 1952 and 2017 film adaptations. It illuminates the important functions rituals serve, and how their representations and reconfigurations enable a text to resonate with audiences to reflect contemporary cultural norms and values. It explores these questions: Which rituals are most salient in the different versions of My Cousin Rachel? How do these rituals differ across the versions to drive the plot, illuminate characters, and reflect the contemporary cultural context? The chapter identifies and interprets four salient categories and functions of rituals across the versions.

  PublisherDOI

• Rituals, Consumption, and Marketing

  2025-08-13

  book1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Shining the spotlight on marketplace rituals: a review and research agenda

  2024-10-30

  review

  Although rituals are commonplace in marketer-consumer interactions, extant research devotes limited attention to how ‘marketplace actors’ or MAs (marketers and stakeholders enacting the roles of marketers) leverage these events in the marketplace. We scrutinise this gap by examining literature in the top 50 major marketing journals. We ask: What functions do marketplace rituals fulfil for MAs, as they leverage these rituals when shaping customer experiences? Our analysis finds MAs leverage rituals to support seven broad functional categories that pertain to customer experience: cognitive, cultural, emotive, logistical, relational, social, and transformative. We illuminate how MAs leverage these functions to meet specific goals. We propose an agenda for future research on marketplace rituals.

  PublisherDOI

• It's Time to Get Decadent

  Journal of Customer Behaviour · 2023-05-31

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Shining the spotlight on marketplace rituals: a review and research agenda

  Journal of Marketing Management · 2023-05-16 · 9 citations

  review

  Although rituals are commonplace in marketer-consumer interactions, extant research devotes limited attention to how ‘marketplace actors’ or MAs (marketers and stakeholders enacting the roles of marketers) leverage these events in the marketplace. We scrutinise this gap by examining literature in the top 50 major marketing journals. We ask: What functions do marketplace rituals fulfil for MAs, as they leverage these rituals when shaping customer experiences? Our analysis finds MAs leverage rituals to support seven broad functional categories that pertain to customer experience: cognitive, cultural, emotive, logistical, relational, social, and transformative. We illuminate how MAs leverage these functions to meet specific goals. We propose an agenda for future research on marketplace rituals.

  PublisherDOI

• From plate to place: the role of restaurant servicescapes in the development of tourists' place meanings in Brittany, France

  2022-11-29

  book-chapterSenior author

  Taking an inductive approach, this paper explores a key question with respect to tourists' meaning creation: What is the role of servicescapes in the development of place meanings for tourists? The research is situated in place and appropriation theory and leverages a large two-phase qualitative study on tourists' restaurant experiences in Brittany, an important tourism destination in the North-West of France. Analysis of the narrative data uncovers four dimensions of restaurant servicescapes that contribute to place meaning. These are: The Interior Environment; The Service Offer; The Social Environment, and the Restaurant Exterior. Furthermore, the research provides insights into the ways tourists connect servicescapes to destinations through physical and sensorial immersion, investigation, and learning. This research can help practioners in creating more meaningful holiday experiences and in branding and promoting tourism destinations. It opens the way for the exploration of the role other tourism services in the development of meaningful tourism experiences.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Pauline Maclaran

  Royal Holloway University of London

  37 shared

• Tina M. Lowrey

  17 shared

• Eileen Fischer

  14 shared

• Elizabeth Pleck

  14 shared

• Julie A. Ruth

  Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

  13 shared

• Robert Arias

  9 shared

• Linda Tuncay

  8 shared

• Arun Sreekumar

  Baylor College of Medicine

  7 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Business Administration

  University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

  1989

• M.S., Business Administration

  University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

  1984

• B.S., Business Administration

  University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

  1982