Within the framework of the Visiting Professorship (ViP) Program, visiting professors have the opportunity to exchange with EMSBS faculty during research seminars. These exchanges often lead to collaborative projects that will further boost the international reach of our School's research activities.
To give a concrete example, Jim Mourey, associate professor of marketing at De Paul University in Chicago, is a ViP who taught the course Marketing Team Leadership to students in the PGE specialization Strategic & Operational Marketing.
In collaboration with Claire Roederer, full professor and head of the Customer Experience Chair, they have created the course Brand Experiences around the World. It is taught in their respective institutions and allows their students to work together. On March 23, students from EMSBS met with De Paul students in Paris to work on brand experiences.
In addition, Jim Mourey participated in a research seminar organized by the Customer Experience Chair on March 16 as part of the AFM's Customer Experience Thematic Interest Group. In front of a dozen colleagues, he presented a project on which he is collaborating with Jenny Olson (Indiana University):
“Smart” products and artificially intelligent (AI) service providers—products marketers and consumers routinely anthropomorphize—are becoming more popular in the marketplace. However, these “smart” products do not always meet performance expectations. From self-driving cars crashing into pedestrians to digital voice assistants misunderstanding simple requests, poor performance may shift consumer support away from these anthropomorphic products toward more traditional machines or human service providers. Five experiments show that consumer support for an anthropomorphic product suffers the most following poor performance compared to a human or non-anthropomorphic product alternative. Drawing upon the stereotype content model, we show that effects are driven by differences in perceived warmth: anthropomorphic products performing as expected seem warmer (like a human) while underperforming anthropomorphic products seem colder (like a machine). We demonstrate that a “warmth boost” can restore consumer support for an anthropomorphic product, thereby mitigating the negative effects of poor performance. We rule out differences in initial performance expectations across sources as an alternative explanation. The current work’s conceptualization of anthropomorphism as dynamic contributes to marketing research, and the role of warmth in mitigating negative consequences of poor performance for “smart” products may influence marketing practice.
Finally, Claire Roderer and Jim Mourey are currently working on a research project on brand experience and storytelling, as well as the publication of a book on experiential strategies.
We hope that this example of collaboration will inspire others when new visiting professors arrive for the 2022/2023 edition of the ViP Program.