MSMR Graduate: James
Topic: This article examines the emergent Chinese marketplace along with the growth of Chinese brands that are becoming increasingly more competitive amid existing competition from American brands.
Research: The present research focuses on three Chinese electronic brands, including Lenovo, Huawei, and Xiaomi to explore how relatively unknown Chinese brands could gain awareness and market share in the United States. This project explores the perception of the salience of American brands under Chinese ownership, as well as the perception of co-branding by Chinese/U.S. firms through a quantitative study.
Conclusions: One way to grow in the U.S. market is through acquisitions and partnerships, which Chinese firms have utilized for expansion. This research seeks to determine the perception of recent acquisitions and partnerships by the Chinese firms.
MSMR Graduate: Jonathan & Jeffrey
Topic: This research seeks to explore the potential effects of social influence in the early stages of consumer-based brand equity, and to expand the current understanding of brand equity to encompass consumers, brands, and other external influences.
Research: Employing scales from existing literature to measure brand awareness and brand associations, participants in the experimental groups are primed with either the true average ratings of others or a positive or negative manipulation of these ratings. Using shoes, a popular consumer product with existing recognizable brands, the initial study finds a significant effect from social influence. One’s shoe brand engagement in self-concept also stood out as a significant factor.
Conclusions: At the current state of research, findings were not reproducible in other product types. The paper highlights the hypotheses, research, findings, and further discusses potential challenges that may have emerged in the subsequent experiments.
MSMR Graduate: Madeleine
Topic: This study investigates what kind of user engagement is likely to accurately show true user preferences.
Research: This research aims to study the “problematic” online persona on Social Media through the case of Instagram, by looking into user opinions of Instagram profiles, their own included, as well as the motivation behind their content and engagement.
Conclusions: The results of this research can help researchers and marketers understand what social media data is potentially useful – or can be misleading – for targeted advertising efforts on the Instagram platform. Based on the motivations, certain user engagement, such as liking and hashtags, were deemed more accurate in predicting the content preferences of the users than posting content. In response to this, the research suggests ways to interpret engagement differently and ways to make user’s accounts more reliable.