IBSS students present at marketing conference

Students from International Business School Suzhou at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University presented their research at a marketing conference held in Xi’an.

The students, who were both undergraduate and masters level, gave presentations at the China Marketing International Conference 2015, held at the School of Management at Xi’an Jiaotong University.

Meng Wang, who is studying MRes Management, presented her research project on Chinese “damas” and their social identities during a session for doctoral students on the first day of the conference. Dama, which literally means "big mothers" in Chinese, is a broad term for middle-aged, middle-class Chinese women.

Meng won an award at the XJTLU Poster Day 2015 for the project and wrote an article about damas for the China Economic Review.

Additionally, she presented a co-authored paper in the conference’s regular programme about damas as a consumer group, which built on data collected by Xiang Guo, a BA Business Administration student, as part of his final year project at XJTLU.

Other students’ presentations were also based on their final year projects. Business administration student Haoyue Bai and Zhuchen Huang, who is studying BA Marketing, presented on match-making services for China’s "left-over women", a term used for unmarried women over the age of 27, while business administration student Ruri Chen’s project investigated the influence of siblings on charitable giving.

Kexin Li, a BSc Information Management and Information Systems student, gave a presentation on her project looking at how people react to emotional charitable appeals, while fellow information management student Chenyu Wang spoke about her project on personalised advertising.

The students were led by Dr Florian Kohlbacher, associate professor of marketing and innovation at IBSS, who supervised and co-authored four of their projects

He said: “I’m delighted our students had the opportunity to present their excellent projects at this international conference. The audience was particularly impressed by their strong empirical research work and presentation skills.”

Dr Kohlbacher also presented a paper co-authored with Professor Ken Matsuno from Babson College.

Professor Sarah Dixon, Dean of IBSS, said: “We are very proud of our students’ achievements and the dedication of academic supervisors like Dr Kohlbacher who support students through academic leadership and advice, as well as offering them the opportunity to publish co-authored papers.”