Professor Holbrook has taught marketing strategy, sales management, consumer behavior, and commercial communication in the culture of consumption. He has conducted research on the validity of perceptual and preference mapping and on consumer aesthetics applied to responses toward radio listening, jazz recordings, and classical music. His current research studies consumption experiences, nostalgia, communication effects, semiotics, and hermeneutics in marketing, as well as symbolic consumption in works of art, interpretive methods, techniques of visual representation, and aspects of consumer responses to pop culture and entertainment.