On October 14, the fourth session of SISU MBA Forum Series came to a successful conclusion. With the theme of Brain-Computer Collaboration and Digital Marketing, this forum focused on the digital marketing concentration of SISU MBA program. We invited Professor Chen Jie from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Deputy Director of Deloitte China Innovation Department Wang Yanlei, founding partner of Plusmind Li Minghao, and Professor Shen Qiang from SISU School of Business and Management to share their ideas on data-driven marketing innovation, innovation economy, Internet marketing and artificial intelligence, and neuromarketing in cloud meeting. Associate Professor Wang Xin, Director of the MBA Center of School of Business and Management, delivered the opening speech. Professor Shen Qiang presided over the forum.
Opening Speech
Associate Professor Wang Xin, Director of the MBA Center, said in his speech that the MBA program had always been committed tocultivating BORDERLESS MANAGEMENT elites to create value for the world. Borderless administration was not only about using foreign languages in the curriculum, but focused on aligning with the frontier theory and technology in this field, thus connecting with the whole world. The principles of internationalization ran through the entire program, from the teaching of professional theories and the training of practical skills to the designing of curriculum and building of faculty.
Associate Professor Wang stressed that a well-designed curriculum was the foundation of a good MBA program. SISU MBA was authorized to offer doctoral degree program in business administration and had the postdoctoral research station. The School of Business and Management had two laboratories with distinct features: Artificial Intelligence and Data Science; and Brain and Cognitive Science Application. The School of Business and Management was also the first business school in the world to have MRI equipment. Dean of the Wharton School commented, This is the best equipped business school I've ever seen, better than Wharton. In recent years, these two laboratories had produced a large number of excellent scientific research results. The MBA program aimed to provide students with the best learning experiences by offering hands-on practices in corporations and the cutting-edge academic results.
Data-Driven Marketing Innovation
Chen Jie, Professor of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, addressed the forum on the topic of Data-Driven Marketing Innovation. She pointed out that the purpose of marketing was to better sell products to consumers and promote commercial exchange. Therefore, marketing research should aim to study and understand the needs of consumers so as to help enterprises promote market exchange. The effects of marketing innovation should be evaluated from the results. Because the purpose of marketing was to serve the enterprises, those theories and practices that could help enterprises better market their products and services in the short or the long term were all marketing innovations. How to help enterprises achieve better marketing effects? The key was to improve the efficiency by optimizing the distribution of marketing resources.
Professor Chen also pointed out that significant progress had been made in the acquisition of marketing data (consumer and enterprise data during the whole process of business) and the technology of data analysis, thus greatly enriching the sources and acquisition of data. With more data, marketing models had changed from a theory-centered approach to an approach that is driven by both theory and data. Following that, he introduced two forms of data-driven marketing, and elaborated on this point by analyzing three specific cases: blockchain + agriculture, big data + tourism, and livestreaming. The enriched data sources enabled market professionals to analyze consumer and enterprise data during the whole process of business, discover the relations in the data sets, and build data models, which could facilitate marketing performance prediction and decision-making.
Digital Process and Brain-like Intelligence in Innovation Economy
Deputy Director Wang believed that in the era of innovation economy, technology was essential to the market. The current market features could be described from eight aspects: external market, business model, business ecology, customer demand, innovation capability, innovation value and natural ecology. Through quantitative analysis of literature, a model with seven major characteristics was finally obtained. He believed that in an economy driven by innovation, enterprises should seek to create new value and find new development space from these seven aspects: ideology, strategic orientation, management efficiency, individual innovation, individual digital capability, value attribute, and especially knowledge innovation chain.
Second, Deputy Director Wang pointed out that from the perspective of corporate governance, there was a tool called ten types of innovation that could help enterprises identify their characteristics from ten perspectives: profit model, partner network, organizational structure, operating process, product performance, product system, service, channel, brand, and customer interaction. Then, he elaborated on the point with Microsoft as an example.
Last but not least, Deputy Director Wang explained how brain-like technology can empower marketing, especially in service and product delivery, and to improve customer experience. People had different psychologies and personalities, and these differences and vague inner needs could be captured and categorized by modern behavioral science, brain science, neuroscience and psychology methods, which could facilitate marketing and business decision-making. He pointed out that during this process, the business community usually took an innovative neuroscience approach to do behavioral analysis, market research, and user experience research.
Evolution of Internet Advertising & Application of AI
Mr. Li Minghao, founding partner of Plusmind (former General Manager of Google Greater China Channel Sales), introduced the development of Internet advertising in detail from the perspective of a product manager, and pointed out that the increase of Internet users and the progress made in basic hardware and software were fundamental to the development of Internet advertising. One of the key developments was machine learning. In famous tech companies like Google, machine learning was applied to promote the performance of advertising. It was predicted that AI would have wider application in Internet advertising in the future.
In addition to machine learning, he mentioned that deep learning could also be used in this field. For example, Internet big data could be analyzed by neuroscience and deep learning to shed light on consumer preferences. In the future, AI would also be applied to study marketing.
The Current State and Future of Neuromarketing
Professor Shen Qiang from SISU School of Business and Management addressed the forum on the theme of “the Current Status and Future of Neuromarketing”. Professor Shen started from analyzing the news in digital marketing and advertisements that had attracted much attention recently. He gave examples from both sides to interpret consumer behaviors and offered detailed explanations from four perspectives: consumer value representation, consumer behavior prediction, consumer mind reading and computer modeling.
Then, Professor Shen showed how neuroscience can promote marketing. By studying the brain activity, neuroscience could help predict whether a new product would succeed in the marketplace. For example, marketing practitioners could carry out market research, hand out questionnaires and adopt other methods, coupled with neuroscience data from MRI, to predict market performance and consumer behavior before launching a product.
The fourth session of SISU MBA Forum Series Brain-Computer Collaboration and Digital Marketing was successfully concluded.
Since 2021, SISU has started to offer an MBA program focused on digital marketing. Different from traditional marketing, digital marketing is a professional concentration that is rooted in new technologies such as big data analytics and AI algorithms. SISU is the first institution in China to offer such a MBA program with the Institute of Neural Information System and Digital Marketing as the core. Students in this concentration can attend lectures and forums to study digital marketing strategy, online consumer behavior, data-driven marketing, supply chain management in digital marketing. Therefore, they will be able to master the latest theories and technologies in the world, and cultivate a mindset of quantitative marketing. Meanwhile, the Laboratory of Artificial Intelligence and Data Science Application offers the platform for students to do research and experiment, which enables them to apply the methods of big data analysis to solving marketing problems for enterprises in the real world.
