市场营销学系学术讲座

时间：2023年12月12日（周二）13:30-15:00

地点：思源楼 624

主题：Content Marketing: When Do Firms Handicap Themselves with Brand-Neutral Content in a Competitive Environment?

主持人：庄雷

主讲人：Yi Lu, Assistant professor of Marketing at CEIBS

摘要:

This study investigates content marketing, a vital facet of inbound marketing that engages potential customers through brand-neutral content. Firms aim to attract consumers without overtly promoting products. We address when and to what extent firms should adopt content marketing versus traditional brand advertising in a competitive environment. Using a game- theoretical framework, we demonstrate how content marketing shapes search prominence, considering consumers’ information needs, firms’ strategies, and emergence of prominence. While content marketing can facilitate search prominence by addressing category-level needs, it does not fully resolve uncertainties associated with brand and product matching, leading to some purchasing uncertainty for consumers. Competition adds complexity as rival firms harness category- need recognition facilitated by content marketing and complement it with brand-specific match information. This approach enables them to set prices based on more nuanced customer infor- mation. This highlights the benefits of brand advertising, granting firms strategic flexibility. We then illustrate how content marketing can, counterintuitively, gain a competitive edge by influencing the rival’s pricing incentives, thus shaping consumers’ rational beliefs. Additionally, we explore scenarios involving price observability, demonstrating the strategic value of content marketing in shaping consumer behavior and fostering market prominence.

简介:

Dr. Lu is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at CEIBS. Prior to joining CEIBS, she received her PhD in Marketing from Yale University and was an Assistant Professor of Marketing at McGill University. Her research interests focus on Artificial Intelligence in marketing and management, new tech-driven business models, digital media and content marketing, and the creative industries. She applies game theory, large-scale field experiments, and economic models to assist companies and public institutions in conducting business decision analysis and constructing business models. Her research achievements have been published and are under review at leading academic journals in Marketing, Economics, and Computer Science, such as Marketing Science, Management Science, The RAND Journal of Economics, and ACM Conference on Economics and Computation.