On Friday, December 2, 2022, a group of five professors from CEIBS, Fudan University, ShanghaiTech University, and NYU Shanghai presented their recent research in person at the 4th Marketing Science Salon of Shanghai Universities. This academic event was co-organized by the Center for Business Education and Research (CBER), NYU Shanghai, and the Center for Data-Driven Managerial Decision Making, Fudan University, with around 30 passionate scholars from 10 universities in Shanghai and abroad in the audience.
The event marks the return of this signature workshop in Shanghai's marketing science community after a two-year pause due to the pandemic. The salon took place at Kubrick Bookstore at Qiantan and was hosted by Chen Yuxin, Dean of Business and Director of CBER at NYU Shanghai. In his opening welcome remark, Chen called this event “a prelude to the rich academic experience NYU Shanghai expects to bring to the area” with the opening of its new Qiantan campus in January 2023 while celebrating its 10 years anniversary.
Zhang Lingling, Assistant Professor of Marketing at China Europe International Business School (CEIBS), led off the day's program by introducing her research to answer the question, 'is relevancy everything?' Her research uses an innovative deep-learning model to measure the congruence level between image and text and further examines the effect of congruence using data from a leading platform company specializing in extracurricular materials for young readers. "My co-authors and I find a U-shape relationship between image-text congruence and preference, that is, the preference level is high when congruence is either high or low, but the underlying mechanisms differ at the two ends," said Zhang. Their findings can help companies design multimedia content to achieve optimal congruence levels.
Following the first sharing, Fan Xiaomeng, Assistant Professor in the School of Entrepreneurship and Management at ShanghaiTech University, proceeded with the program. Fan spoke on the impact of product-irrelevant talk in the livestream business, which can be wisely summarized as 'small talk but large contribution.' This research by Fan and her coauthors aims at identifying an effective communication strategy that improves consumer engagement. With their present research outcome and further optimization, it is promising that their ultimate findings will provide insights that help streamers succeed in the livestream shopping industry, a 500 billion USD market.
Zhuang Lei, a new faculty member who joined Fudan University this July, took over the event flow by introducing her Ph.D. dissertation work on retargeting, an online marketing strategy whereby a firm serves ads on social media or other external websites related to the consumer's browsing information on the firm's website before. The research question in this study lies in whether tracking cookies increases or decreases advertisers' auction competition in a dynamic setting and its impact on the ad platform's profits. Zhuang's research interest is at the nexus of online advertising, digital marketing, and information economics.
Moving to the second half of the agenda, Fang Zhen, also a new faculty member who joined Fudan University this year, shared her study on the role of voice in consumer decisions with evidence from an online knowledge-sharing platform. "We believe that this is the first study examining the demand generation of knowledge products with the audio-based audition. On top of that, it evaluated the economic impact of voice features," said Fang.
Last but never least, NYU Shanghai's newly-appointed Assistant Professor Jieru (Vivian) Xie presented her research that ponders the rank length effect on evaluations and choice. Rank lists vary in length—the number of items ranked on the list (e.g., Top 5 vs. Top 20 movies). This research shows that the same ranked items are judged more positively, but the difference between ranked items is smaller when rank length is longer (vs. shorter). Xie and her coauthors also find that the effect of rank length on choice is more nuanced, and is contingent on attainability and the nature of the comparison.
This year's event attracted an audience including research-oriented faculty and Ph.D. candidates from ten major universities in Shanghai. After four years of productive collaboration between the two centers, especially with the help from Zhang Zhe, Associate Professor of Marketing at Fudan University, this event has built quite a reputation in the marketing science area in Shanghai. Previously, the salons were held at NYU Shanghai, Fudan University, and ShanghaiTech University. And many top universities in Shanghai have expressed interest in hosting future salon events.
Appreciation to all the speakers and participants from the following universities:
- China Europe International Business School
- Donghua University
- East China Normal University
- Fudan University
- NYU Shanghai
- Shanghai Advanced Institute of Finance
- Shanghai Jiao Tong University
- ShanghaiTech University
- Shanghai University of Finance and Economics
- University of Minnesota