UH Doctoral symposium: A review of hot topics in emerging marketing resarch

The 36th UH Marketing Doctoral Symposium on April 6, 2018 served to do more than just enable dialog among emerging scholars in Marketing. With 10 research talks from scholars examining marketing problems from a behavioral and quantitative perspective, the symposium highlighted important current and future streams of research. These are best seen as starting steps, with a specific and narrow focus, potentially leading to more interesting research in future:

1. Mobile: 

• Focus: How does mobile impact shopping in online and offline channels?
• Extensions: (1) Mobile "last mile" -- where are the returns on mobile coming from? Advanced user-profiling based on location and movement data, for improved targeting in other channels and analytics on visitation, purchases, competition (2) Beyond shopping: Mobile's impact for health, and education
• Student researcher-in-focus: Boram Lim, UT Dallas

2. AI and robotics

• ​Focus: How do consumers perceive human-likeness in robots? Investigating the "uncanny valley" in its upward trajectory
• Extensions: (1) Contexts and settings when the upward trajectory might not exist at all, e.g., robots as co-workers (2) Beyond physical aspects of human-likeness, how would consumers respond based on 2-way interactions with robots? (3) Affective computing and implications for consumption and choice
• Student researcher-in-focus: Noah Castelo, CBS

3. Search and Segmentation

• Focus: How can offline search and learning improve our extant models of simultaneous search and choice? Segmentation is still cool, with new cutting-edge machine learning approaches to segment consumers based on purchase behavior
• Extensions: Online and offline search modeled together, with a view to profiling shoppers / segmentation based on search might be a promising domain
• Student researchers-in-focus: Dan Yavorsky, UCLA and Milad Darani, Mays Business School

4. Pro-social and gift-giving behaviors 

• Focus: Consumer preference between charity and cash registries, consumer valuation of products based on object history value
• Extensions: The importance of trust and privacy in these settings might be an interesting avenues to study in future, e.g., in pro-social behavior, leveraging online efficiencies to ensure the last dollar donated is benefitting the persons intended. 
• Student researchers-in-focus: Michelle Daniels, ASU and Charis Li, UF