Marketing
MPhil-PhD in Marketing
The MPhil/PhD programme in Marketing aims to provide solid training to prepare students for careers in teaching and research in higher education and research institutions. We mainly admit PhD students to train them as academic researchers. Most of them continue pursuing their academic career after they graduate.
There are two research streams in our PhD programme: Quantitative Stream and Behavioural Stream.
Quantitative stream
The quantitative stream of our PhD programme aims to provide students solid training in both empirical and analytical skills in marketing, significant interaction and collaboration with the faculty, and eventually productivity in both independent and co-authored work. In particular, our quantitative stream focuses on big data, mobile and digital marketing, social networks, and behavioural economics, and economics of psychology. Students take advanced economics courses, statistics courses, advanced marketing seminars, as well as other courses provided by other departments (e.g., machine learning course at engineering school). Our quantitative faculty have published papers in top tier marketing journals such as Marketing Science, Journal of Marketing Research, and Management Science. They actively work with students through first year independent research projects, departmental seminars, dissertation work, and informal interactions. Students are expected to use their initiative and make substantial contributions to the area.
Behavioural stream
Behavioural stream of marketing PhD focuses on the study of how individuals behave in consumer-related domains. This area draws from cognitive and social psychology, behavioural decision processes, and behavioural economics. Core faculty have interests in judgment and decision making, affect and motivation, consumer well-being, embodied cognition, sensory marketing, categorization processes, cultural influences on consumer behaviour and consumer information processing. Students are given solid training in experimental as well as other social science methods, taking courses in both marketing and psychology at an early stage of their study and doing research with several different faculty members during their first two years before choosing a primary research topic and thesis advisor. Recent research conducted by past and current students cuts across many areas, including the effects of emotion (embarrassment, nostalgia, jealousy, and anger) on consumer behaviour, services marketing, numerosity, social networking donation behaviour, justice and mortality salience. Their research has been published in top tier marketing, general science, and psychology journals including Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Marketing, Journal of Consumer Psychology, Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, Psychological Science, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, and Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.