Traning seminar hosted by Contemporary Marketing Center

Speakers:

Mr. Yushan Chen
Marketing Director
Miaozhen Systems

Mr. Yongyi Yu
Chief Data Scientist
Miaozhen Systems

Introduction:

The Contemporary Marketing Center has invited Mr. Chen Yushan and Mr. Yu Yongyi from Miaozhen Systems (秒针系统) to conduct the information and training seminars. Miaozhen Systems is the leading omni-marketing data and technology solution provider in China. Their visit and seminar are to provide information and training about their product and service that can fit the research such as usage of their database, data tracking system.

Marketing Seminar

Speaker:

Mr. Mengzhou Zhuang
Ph.D. Candidate in Marketing
Gies College of Business
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Abstract:

Keyword sponsored advertising serves as a channel for firms to communicate with consumers. Noting the critical role of price information in consumers’ decision making, this study investigates product price as a factor that affects consumers’ responses to such advertising, along with the moderating effects of two keyword attributes. With a hierarchical Bayesian model, the authors analyze a unique data set from a leading electronic shopping platform and find that consumers tend to click more on extreme price options (i.e., highest or lowest), which serve as anchors to evaluate a broad range of options. This effect is diminished among advertisements sponsoring more specific keywords but enhanced among those using more popular keywords. Yet conversion rates are higher for the moderately priced options, which offer a compromise across different product features. This effect weakens for more specific keywords but strengthens for more popular keywords. The findings provide new insights on the role of price information in sponsored keyword advertising, along with managerial implications for devising effective sponsored keyword advertising strategies.

Marketing Seminar

Speaker:

Dr. Freeman Wu
Assistant Professor of Marketing
Owen Graduate School of Management
Vanderbilt University

Abstract:

Financial institution, service providers, and retailers recognize the importance of offering their credit, debit, and gift cards to customers in attractive card designs. For example, credit cards ranging from the Chase Sapphire in the U.S. to the EPOS Visa in Japan have been praised for their eye-catching designs, Capitol One and Wells Fargo readily encourage their clients to design their own credit card cards, and companies from Starbucks to Sephora regularly promote and release highly attractive gift card packaging and card designs. Given the rising popularity of credit and gift card aesthetics, the current research examines the impact that payment aesthetics can have on the overall purchase experience. Across a series of studies, we demonstrate that the aesthetics and design of a payment can enhance the consumption experience by increasing the “pleasure of paying,” or the gratification derived from spending money. In other words, payment aesthetics make the act of spending more pleasurable and enjoyable, which in turn results in greater spending and satisfaction. However, when the payment’s attractiveness must be compromised through spending (e.g. ripping attractive gift card packaging to access a gift card), we propose consumers will experience greater pain from paying, which in turn reduces spending and decreases purchase satisfaction. Taken together, our work not only introduces the pleasure of payment construct to the literature, which we argue is conceptually distinct from pain, but we also identify payment aesthetics as a novel source of pain of payment, one that is exogenous to the payment and unrelated to its fiscal value.

Marketing Seminar

Speaker:

Dr. Xiuping Li
Associate Professor
NUS Business School

Abstract:

This research investigates how parents’ consumption choices for their preadolescent children (aged 9-12 years) affect the children’s self-concept clarity. In four studies, we demonstrate that making experiential consumption (vs. material consumption) salient may lead to an increase in children’s self-concept clarity, which positively influences their well-being. Furthermore, the influence of consumption type on self-concept clarity and well-being is not monotonic. It is moderated by (1) the extent to which children perceive that their parents’ choice is driven by social influence and (2) whether the children hold high versus low interdependent self-construal. By measuring the proportion of experiential consumption expenses on children at the household level (reported by parents) or experimentally manipulating the salience of different types of consumption, we demonstrate not only the associative but also the causal link between parental choice of consumption type and self-concept clarity in preadolescent children.

Marketing Seminar

Speaker:

Professor Thomas P. Novak
Denit Trust Distinguished Scholar and Professor of Marketing
Co-Director, Center for the Connected Consumer
George Washington University

Abstract:

The Internet of Things (IoT), comprised of billions of smart devices representing trillions of interactions, has the potential to generate entirely new consumer experiences. In this paper, we develop a computational social science framework, grounded in assemblage theory concepts, to extract the shape and structure of consumer experience from the language of IoT interactions rendered as structured text. Our multi-stage framework uniquely integrates methods from computational linguistics (word2vec), unsupervised machine learning (t-SNE), and computational topology (topological data analysis) to: 1) identify and visualize the structure of the segments of consumer experience based on the similarity between IoT interaction events, and 2) for any given IoT interaction event, discover similar events that can further exploit current use and help explore new uses. Because the results are extracted from the actual interactions consumers engage in when they connect devices and services together, in the language in which they connect them, our framework can help consumers expand their use of the IoT and help marketers better target their marketing and communications programs and product and business development efforts.

* This is a 3-hour workshop.  The first section is offered by Prof. Thomas Novak and the second section is offered by Prof. Donna Hoffman.

Marketing Seminar

Speaker:

Professor Donna L. Hoffman
Louis Rosenfeld Distinguished Scholar and Professor of Marketing
Co-Director, The Center for the Connected Consumer
George Washington University School of Business

Abstract:

The consumer IoT has the potential to revolutionize consumer experience because consumers can actively interact with smart objects. In order to successfully interact with smart objects, e.g. trusting them to make decisions on our behalf, it is imperative that we understand how they experience the world. An obvious process for understanding object experience is human-centered anthropomorphism. Yet, anthropomorphizing smart objects presents a number of obstacles to understanding how they are likely to impact the world going forward. We argue that understanding object experience should be from the perspective of the object. We develop an approach based on assemblage theory to interpreting consumers’ interactions with smart objects. Our approach involves a trio of “alien phenomenology” tools including ontography, metaphorism, and carpentry that involve both qualitative and computational analyses to render object experience accessible. Our approach can provide marketers with expanded opportunities to improve product design and development efforts and support better marketing communication programs that communicate enriched value to consumers. More broadly, we believe our approach can lead to a better understanding of smart objects as AI becomes ubiquitous.

* This is a 3-hour workshop.  The first section is offered by Prof. Thomas Novak and the second section is offered by Prof. Donna Hoffman.

Marketing Seminar

Speaker:

• Dr. Alexander Isakov
  Postdoctoral Fellow
  Yale Institute for Network Science
  Yale University

Abstract:

Negative (antagonistic, or enemy) connections have been of longstanding theoretical importance for social structure. In a population of almost 25,000 adults interacting face-to-face in isolated villages, we measured over 100,000 positive and 15,000 negative ties. Here, we show that negative ties exhibit many of the same structural characteristics as positive ties, including a skewed degree distribution, reciprocity, and degree assortativity. We then exploit this large sample to develop and enumerate a complete taxonomy of all possible triads consisting of the expanded relationship set. Consistent with balance theory, enemies of friends and friends of enemies tend to be enemies; but, in an important empirical refutation of classical balance theory, we find that “the enemy of my enemy is more likely to be my enemy”. We also explore higher-order (community-level) results. Thus, negative ties, though uncommon relative to positive ties, play an important role in social structure.