Great lakes – NASMEI conference on Consumer Behavior in the Post-Covid era
New Delhi: The Great Lakes Institute of Management, Chennai hosted their 14th NASMEI International marketing conference in collaboration with the North American Society of for Marketing Education in India (NASMEI). The virtual conference was prelude by a 3-day workshop providing great opportunity for the doctoral students and junior faculty to interact and learn from some of the top researchers in the world.
The premier annual conference held at Great Lakes Institute of management was organized by the Kotler-Srinivasan Center for Research in Marketing. The session was inaugurated by Dr. Suresh Ramanathan, Dean, Great Lakes Institute of management, followed by the welcome address by Prof. Bala V Balachandran, Founder, Chairman of the board and Dean Emeritus, Great Lakes Institute of Management.
The keynote address was delivered by Dr. Seenu Srinivasan, Adams Distinguished Professor of Management, Emeritus, Graduate School of Business, Stanford University, USA. Speaking on the occasion he said, “I started this conference back in 2007, with the encouragement of Prof. Bala, for the purpose of bringing Indian researchers together with researchers from all over the world, so we can learn from each other. At the time I was a board member at NASMEI, and it was a great opportunity to connect NASMEI to Great Lakes. Since then, it has been ably and efficiently run under the stewardship of Prof. Bharadhwaj and Prof. Sridhar Samu.” While presenting his paper ‘Comparison of Maxdiff and ASEMAP for the measurement of individual-level attribute importance’ he said, “The traditional method of assessing attribute importance through a ranking system does not work very well. This is because, given a list of attributes to rank, people tend to say everything is important. Which is why methods like MaxDiff and ASEMAP should strongly be considered for commercial market research.”
The 5-day long event included workshop conducted by the pioneers in business management and consumer behaviours such as Professor Shailendra Pratap Jain (University of Washington), Professor Aparna Labroo (Northwestern University), Professors Lauren Block (Baruch College), Simon Botti (London Business School), Angela Lee (Northwestern University), L J Shrum (HEC, Paris), and Andrew Stephen (Oxford University).
The two-day conference had papers presented by students and researchers from all over India. A wide variety of topics from the study of gamification to Ethics in Consumer decision making and to Impact of OTT platforms on consumers were addressed and discussed during the conference, specifically addressing the post-covid challenges and trends in the segment. Some of the best research papers competed under the Raj Sethuraman Research Grant, and Bala and Vasantha Balachandran Research Grant, by the Great Lakes Institute of Management
“Raising the standards and quality of research in India has been the aim of Great Lakes Institute of Management and with this 14th edition of Great Lakes NASMEI International conference, we have reached one more step closer to the goal” added Prof. S. Bharadhwaj, Dr. Bala V Balachandran & Vasantha Balachandran Chair Professor of Marketing, Director.