Jie Meng

Institute of Digital Technologies,
Loughborough University London,
Lesney Avenue
The Broadcast Centre
Here East
Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park
Stratford
United Kingdom
E15 2GZ

Email: j.meng at lboro.ac.uk, mktmeng at gmail.com

Institutional Webpage



Short Bio.

I am a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Digital Technologies and the programme director of MSc Digital Marketing at Institute of Digital Technologies , Loughborough University London. Prior to Loughborough, I worked at Oxford Brookes University in the U.K., University of New South Wales and Macquarie University in Australia. My current research concerns the consumer self, digital efficacy and digital wellbeing of electronic marketing, including web content, social media, tech-based communication and AI recommendation.



Workshop Organisation

(July-August/2019) Workshop on Digital Analytics and Simulation Research for MRes and doctoral students, School of Information Resource Management , Renmin University of China



News

1. (06/2019) Subcontracted by “verification and testing of learning-enabled systems” cofounded by the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl) and EPSRC.
2. (06/2019) Attend the Subject Committee Board, Lincoln Business School as Marketing Discipline External Examiner on June 26.
3. (05/2019) Invited to visit a giant automobile big data platform and research hub, Guangzhou WAYS and investigate China's smart car system in July
4. (05/2019) Invited to co-chair the Track of Service Marketing with Prof. Yonggui Wang , China Marketing International Conference ( CMIC/华人学者营销协会第七届中国市场营销国际学术年会), Guangzhou, China, July 22-25
5. (04/2019) To Host the research workshop at School of Information Resource Management, Renmin University, Beijing, China, July 25-30
6. (04/2019) External Research Showcase, Institution of Digital Technologies, Loughborough University London (to come up soon)
7. (03/2019) Three co-authored conference papers accepted by 2019 European Marketing Academy Conference (EMAC) and Global Fashion Management Conference (GFMC, abstract by Jie’s full name search on page)



Current Research Project

1. Computational Advertising on Smart New Media
2. Online Information Exchange and Social Impacts
3. Self-Construal and Projection on Brand Image
4. IoTs and Smart Connection with its Application in Marketing/Retailing
(Note: All the above areas are fermenting a few publications to come up soon.)



Publications



Manuscripts Under Working or Review


• How does preference on hearsay vs credence impact word-of-mouth evolution?
• The more we know, the more likely we will agree? some initial findings from simulation experiments
• Information Acquisition and Group Value Shaping of Online Tribalism: How Does User Activeness Matter?
• Stickiness of Online Communication: Experiments on Information Transmission Complexity
• Can Consumption Rituals Enhance Brand Attitude? An Experimental Study to Conceptualize Ritualization in Consumption
• Linking Environment Awareness, Ambidexterity and Marketing Outcomes: An Empirical Examination of Pharmacy Retailer Efficiency and Effectiveness
• Adopting Dissonance-solving Approach to Investigate Luxury Social Media Advertising: Roles of Gaps in Self, Projective Self, Influencer and Brand Image



Journal Paper

 Jie Meng, Roger Layton, Yimin Huang. (2016). Why do some consumers shop in this pharmacy for health-products? A cross-check of vulnerable characteristics and store types, Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services., Vol 30 (May), pp. 116-130.
 Heng Lian, Taeryon Choi, Jie Meng, Seongil Jo. (2016). Posterior Convergence for Bayesian Functional Linear Regression. Journal of Multivariate Analysis, Vol. 150 (Sep), pp. 27-41.
 Heng Lian, Jie Meng, & Zengyan Fan. (2015). Simultaneous estimation of linear conditional quantiles with penalized splines. Journal of Multivariate Analysis, 141 (na), pp.1-21.
 Heng Lian, Jie Meng, Kaifeng Zhao, (2015). Spline estimator for simultaneous variable selection and constant coefficient identification in high-dimensional generalized varying-coefficient models, Journal of Multivariate Analysis, Vol. 141, Iss. C, pp. 81-103.
 Jie Meng. (2015). Sustainability: A framework of typology based on efficiency and effectiveness, Journal of Macromarketing. Vol. 35, Iss:1, pp. 84-98.
 Peng Lai, Jie Meng, and Heng Lian. (2015). Polynomial spline approach for variable selection and estimation in varying coefficient models for time series data, Statistics and Probability Letters. Vol. 96 (Jan), pp. 21-27.
 Jie Meng, Roger Layton. (2011). Understand manager's marketing strategy choice in a collaborated competition industry: linking context awareness with general strategy, European Business Review. Vol. 23 Iss: 5, pp.477-501.



Conference Paper


 Jie Meng, Yik Shun Ma, Examining the Effectiveness of Fashion Marketing on Social Media: An Experiment on Influencer’s Reputation, Post Type, and Online eWOM Valence, Global Fashion Management Conference, Paris, France, 2019.
 Jie Meng, Jiaying Wang, Adopting Dissonance -Solving Approach to Investigate Luxury Social Media Advertising: Role of Gaps in Self, Projective Self, Influencer and Brand Image, Global Fashion Management Conference, Paris, France, 2019.
 Jie Meng, Emily Cooper, Yan Sun, Experiments on the effectiveness of marketing communications tactics to support ‘unappealing’ animals, 48th EMAC Annual Conference, Hamburg, Germany, 2019.
 Jie Meng, Information-based and conformity-based delight of online tribalism: The effect on self-and social identity moderated by user activeness, Global Marketing Conference, Tokyo, Japan, 2018.
 Jie Meng, How will polarised word-of-mouth evolve mild? A simulated experiment of information preference, decay speed, and halo effect, 47th EMAC Annual Conference, Glasgow, UK, 2018.
 Jie Meng, Minghui Qian, Zhixuan Xu, Experiment on information stickiness in word-of-mouth transmission, the 5th Business Systems Laboratory International Symposium, Naples, Italy, 2018.
 Minghui Qian, Zhixuan Xu, and Jie Meng, Using active FSVM learning method to elicit individual tacit knowledge of brand consideration, the 5th Business Systems Laboratory International Symposium, Naples, Italy, 2018.
 Xiaowei Huang, Qingliang Chen, Jie Meng and Kaile Su, Reconfigurability in reactive multiagent systems, International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), New York, USA, 2017.
 Jie Meng, Roger Layton, Multi-level patterns of efficiency and effectiveness of a marketing system, 41st Macromarketing Conference, Dublin, Ireland, 2016.
 Jie Meng, Hume Winzar, Assortment, location and price differentiation and impacts on macro patterns of efficiency and effectiveness: an experiment through agent-based models, New Zealand Marketing Academy Conference (ANZMAC), Sydney, Australia, 2015.
 Jie Meng, Retail competition in price and assortment and evolution: a simulated experiment, Annual Complexity in Business Conference, Washington, DC, US, 2015.
 Jie Meng, Efficiency, effectiveness, and sustainable marketing: a literature review, New Zealand Marketing Academy Conference (ANZMAC), Brisbane, 2014.
 Jie Meng, Vulnerable consumers and the retail pharmacy selection process, New Zealand Marketing Academy Conference (ANZMAC), Perth, Australia, 2011.
 Jie Meng, Is pharmacy’s role approaching convergent or diversified: an overall examination of marketing efficiency and effectiveness by assortments analysis in urban China, Academy of Marketing Conference (AMC), Coventry, UK, 2010.
 Jie Meng, Unmasking urban Chinese consumers’ assortment and pharmacy choices, China and India Consumer Insight (CICI), Tsinghua University & Yale School of Management, Beijing, China, 2010.
 Roger Layton, Zhirong Duan, Jie Meng, The contemporary research in marketing systems, International Symposium of Marketing Sciences (ISMM), Tianjin, China, 2009.
 Jie Meng, An empirical examination for the collaboration and competition in pharmacy marketing system: linking survey data with agent-based modelling, Collaborative Agents-Research and Development (CARE), Australasian Joint Conference of Artificial Intelligence (AI’09), Melbourne, 2009.
 Zhirong Duan, Jie Meng, Should variety-seeking be encouraged to promote less popular destinations? Australian & New Zealand Marketing Academy Conference (ANZMAC), 2009, Melbourne, Australia.
 Jie Meng, The embedded structure and emergent patterns of marketing system: an interpretation of empirical-based agent-based modelling, Australian & New Zealand Marketing Academy Conference (ANZMAC), 2008, Sydney, Australia.
 Jie Meng, An overview of marketing system’s performance: efficiency and effectiveness, Australian & New Zealand Marketing Academy Conference (ANZMAC), 2008, Sydney, Australia.



Recent Funding and Grants

“Automated Verification and Synthesis of Smart Factories”

Funding Body: National Natural Science Foundation of China Research (NSFC)
Grant No. 61772232/F020101
Investigators: Xiaowei Huang, Jie Meng, Ron van der Meyden
Duration: 2018-2021
RMB￥750,000
Awarded



Potential PhD Opportunity,

PhD Studentships in Digital Technologies at Loughborough University London
The Institute for Digital Technologies at Loughborough University London aims to address major technological challenges, with a focus on machine learning, data analytics, Internet of Things, cyber security, intelligent mobility, immersive and interactive technologies, 5G applications, and human behaviour analysis. It has secured funding for three full-time PhD studentships working on these exciting research areas for three years, opening to all UK/EU applicants and starting in October 2019. In particular, there are a few areas of interests regarding computational advertising and intelligent new media that I would like to recruit PhD students.


Area 1 - Online Influencer, Consumer Ego, and Personalised Web Advert in Decentralised Communication Era



Computational advertising, a.k.a. online advertising, which takes its forms of social media advertising, web advertising, search engine optimisation, AI recommendation and many others, refers to finding the most relevant ads matching a particular context on digital media with content. The context includes consumer personal feature and self-cognition, decision environment, brand endorser or online influencer, and media vehicles. The content means the marketing forms of persuasion regarding product, brand, and service etc.


For long time, the connection between context and content has triggered intensive theoretical discussions all but remains a black box to generate plausible explanations. In digital era, the invasive application of smart tools with information retrieval, large scale search and text analysis and machine learning, can facilitate the linkage to the optimisation practices by reaching a maximised communication effect at the lowest cost.

Objectives:


• To boost the current understanding of consumer egoism in digital context;
• To systematically investigate the roles of consumer self-cognition and expectation in consumer online content browsing behaviours with digital interface;
• To anchor the measure of cognitive dissonance for consumer’s true self (digital clickstream), mirrored self (self-recognition), reference self (influencer) and projective self (brand);
• To experiment and optimise the algorism via different machine learning methods of smart commercial content which presents the best fit of consumer features, web browsing footprints, brand characteristics and influencer traits for a personalised communication;
• To test the feasibility and robustness of intelligent advertising, i.e. how to collect, analyse, and leverage information from diverse pipelines, inclusive of consumer clickstream (for preference or characteristics), consumer dynamic data from experiment test (for personality and decision reasoning), and interpersonal information (for other contexts such as social influence or peer referencing etc), to build a diagnostic tool for computation advertising for generalisable online content optimisation purpose;
• To theorise the mechanism of how to use the computational ads optimisation techniques to customise the suitable digital content and influencer to best trigger their further engagement and action.



Area 2 – Consumer Trust and Decision on AI Tools


The digital technology and smart devices embedded with AI algorism has freed consumers from comprehensive mental cognition and reasoning procedure for an optimised decision pursuit, while at the same time has created massive concerns on the privacy, trustworthiness and ethics which as a part of the loop cause the user demerit on their trust. Bearing the research questions as (1) what is the consumer trust on the smart tools and (2) how does the trust is built and changed with the scenario and transparency of the signals, this project is going to be featured by a series of experiment-dominant lab studies on the reasoning pathways on visuals - behavioural verification from the simulated environment online experiments for conviction, trust, advocacy, and so forth.

Objectives:


• To unveil the mechanism of trigger, formation, evolution, and corruption of digital efficacy and human-machine trust established on hardware and digital experience;
• To integrate the currency of computational social choice to address the aggregation of personal preference, cognition, social reference and human-machine interaction from a computational perspective;
• To understand the role of information disclosure in the Person-to-Computer communication;
• To furthermore observe how the three clues- personal, interpersonal, social dimensions of impacts intertwine with the cognitive process to trigger the progressive cognitive and emotional engagement with the content and decisions;
• To extend the findings by applying the simulation to generate the foresights.



Area 3 - Social Media and Democracy


In every democracy, the legislature provides an interactive, participatory and deliberative platform for citizens’ input in the decision‐making process. It harnesses digital transformation tools and disruptive technologies for improving democratic processes, services and functions. Legislature’s representational roles include ensuring active citizens’ participation in the policy-making process; providing oversight and making laws. In the last five years, there has been an incremental rise in the usage of social media as a source of political information. This has engendered the political information, public opinions and the changing media environment while at the same time has provided opportunities for informed citizenry and participatory democracy (Lee & Kim, 2017). At present, the existing studies have focused on how political social media usage may influence political knowledge.

Thus, this study will attempt to fill the gap in the extant literature by analysing how both political and general social media usage affect individual's political knowledge. Given the relative dearth of clear patterning of association between social media usage and political knowledge, the research aims to further investigate how the political usage of twitter affects political knowledge among citizens of emerging democracies.

Objectives:


• To explain are the purposes of social media usages apart from information sharing;
• To explore the influence of both political and general social media usage on political learning and knowledge;
• To examine mechanisms that drive non-positive or even negative relationship between social media and democracy;
• To propose cross-media approaches that examines the intersections between digital platforms and legacy media;
• To examine issues of cybersecurity especially with governments trying to influence elections of other countries with the use of bots and data privacy issues; effective regulation of social media for political usages to curb misinformation and propaganda;
• To propose cross-media approaches that examines the intersections between digital platforms and legacy media;
• Examine issues of cybersecurity especially with governments trying to influence elections of other countries with the use of bots and data privacy issues; effective regulation of social media for political usages to curb misinformation and propaganda.



If you are interested in doing a PhD in the relevant research areas with me , please feel free to contact me. Loughborough University has a set of established scholarship schemes, including Loughborough china scholarship council scheme (with the expected internal application deadline in Jan 2020 and the external application deadline in March 2020) and Loughborough University Great China Scholarships in UK . The key scholarship schemes are listed as follows.

• PGR loans
• Wellcome Trust
• British Council (Newton fund)
• Commonwealth Scholarships
• Chinese Scholarship Council
• Petroleum Technology Development Fund (PTDF)
• Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC) or Tertiary Education Trust (TET)
• Research Councils (CDT, DTP and iCASE awards)



Visitors

Dr. Naijuan Sun , Associate Professor, Heilongjiang University, Associate Research Fellow of Marketing Research Centre of China (MRCC)



Teaching Calibre


Current Leadership of Teaching at Loughborough University

1. Semester 1, 2019/2020. Postgraduate, MSc Digital Marketing Programme. Strategic Marketing Management, Loughborough University London
2. Semester 1, 2019/2020. Postgraduate, MSc Digital Marketing Programme. Design Practices in Digital Industries, Loughborough University London
3. Semester 2, 2019/2020. Postgraduate, MSc Digital Marketing Programme. Strategy and Planning, Loughborough University London

Previous Teaching Profile


• Digital and Social Media Marketing Strategies (PG), S2, 2017, 18, Brookes
• Digital Marketing Analytics (PG), S2, 2017, 18, Brookes
• Marketing Analytics (UG, Honour Component), S2, 2018, Brookes
• Digital Marketing Communications (UG), S2, 2017, Brookes
• Marketing Research (UG), S1-2, 2013-2016, MQ; S2, 2017, Brookes
• Applied Quantitative Approaches in Business and Economics (MRes/HDR), S1, 2014-2016, MQ
• Retailing (UG), S1-2, 2012-2013, MQ
• Marketing Communication (PG), S1, 2014, MQ
• Consumer Behaviour (UG), S1-2, 2013, MQ
• E-marketing (UG), S1-2, 2012-2013, MQ
• Customer Relationship Management (UG), S1, 2012, MQ
• Strategic Marketing (UG), S2, 2011, UNSW
• Marketing Fundamentals (UG), S1-2, 2009, 2010, 2011, UNSW



Referee Experience

• European Journal of Marketing
• Journal of Macromarketing
• Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services
• EMAC conference and EMAC reginal conference
• ANZMAC conference
• Macromarketing conference



External Advisory Board Member

• Marketing Subject Board Member, Lincoln Business School, Lincoln University, 2017-2020



Professional Affiliation and Memberships

• Certified Practicing Marketer of Australian Institute of Marketing (AIM)
• Member of British Management Academy (BAM)
• Member of Academy of Marketing, United Kingdom
• Member of Marketing Research Centre of China (MRCC), China
• Member of Australia and New Zealand Marketing Academy Community (ANZMAC)
• Member of Australian Market and Social Research Society (AMSRS)
• Member of Korean Academy of Marketing Sciences (KAMS), South Korea