Robert Pennington, Ph.D. (University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1991) has held faculty positions at several universities in the USA and Taiwan in departments of communication, management, foreign languages and cultures, and in graduate institutes of international communication studies, technology and innovation management, and e-commerce. He has also lectured at universities in South Korea. The primary focus of his research is mass media as an expression of cultural theory. His writing appears is publications with global readership. The range of topics has included the cultural development implications of communication technology, and consumption and marketing communication as cultural processes for satisfying basic human needs. He has written as well about marketing communication development, advertising and brands within consumer culture, the meanings of consumer brands and psycho-linguistic methodology. His research extensively explicates a theory of culture as a system of symbolic forms, utilizing methodology that selects influential literature from a range of disciplines to form a synthesis of seemingly diverse perspectives.