Great Lakes Institute of Management hosted its ninth North American Society for Marketing Education in India (NASMEI) annual conference at its Chennai campus on December 26 and 27. The conference was organised by the institute’s Kotler Srinivasan Centre for Research in Marketing.
80 delegates, comprising of professors and doctoral students from leading management schools like University of Michigan, Cornell University, University of Miami, University of Utah, University of Southern California, Indian School of Business, Indian Institute of Management Bangalore, Indian Institute of Management Indore, and Indian Institute of Management Kozhikode, participated in the event. The conference discussed the myriad of trends, emerging changes and challenges disrupting the marketing industry.
The two-day conference began with the inaugural ceremony presided by Prof Vithala R Rao, President of NASMEI and professor of marketing and quantitative methods at the Johnson Graduate School of Management, Cornell University.
Rao gave a detailed overview of developments and prospects of marketing science. He began by talking about the evolution of research from retail gravitation in the 60s to empirical generalisations today. He advised marketing enthusiasts and research scholars that today one has to focus more on the quantitative aspects of marketing, which he refers to as ‘marketing science’. He also presented data on how the contribution of non-North American researchers, particularly Indians, had increased steadily from 1982 to 2014, underscoring Indians’ contributions in particular scholars and researchers such as Seenu Srinivasan, himself, Vijay Mahajan, Subrata Sen and a dozen others of Indian origin as key influencers.
Later in the day, research scholars from leading international and Indian b-schools presented their papers on diverse marketing topics like consumer reactions to brands, crisis management of brand, role of involvement of customer engagement, analysing brand experience and its impact on the customer, the impact of media on consumer brand trust, advancing new methods in big data and analytics, to name a few.
The delegates also enjoyed a brief leisure trip to the UNESCO heritage site Mahabalipuram, which was organised by Great Lakes.