SPEAKER: 董贝贝博士 美国理海大学（Lehigh University）市场营销学教授

TIME/DATE：2025.6.23  10:00

CLASSROOM: A402

ABSTRACT 

Advances in technology have spurred the widespread use of personalization in marketing, with personalized promotions widely seen as enhancing customer value. However, name personalization—featuring recipients’ names in marketing messages—can lead to contradictory consequences. This research documents the negative effects of name personalization and explores how pairing it with sender personalization and content personalization can mitigate or reverse its impact on purchase behavior by increasing message credibility. The study also investigates how personalization effectiveness varies by customer relationship stages (new vs. repeat customer). Empirically, the authors conducted two field experiments on WeChat and four follow-up lab studies. The first field experiment shows that name personalization reduces coupon redemption and that sender personalization offsets this effect, with both effects more pronounced among new customers. The second field experiment replicates these findings and further reveals that content personalization effectively reverses the negative impact of name personalization for repeat customers. A subsequent lab experiment confirms these effects in a controlled setting, improving internal validity. Three additional lab experiments systematically test and confirm message credibility as the dominant mechanism underlying the effectiveness of different personalization strategies. This research provides actionable guidance for tailoring personalization strategies to different customer stages.

GUEST BIO

Dr. Beibei Dong is a Professor of Marketing and the George N. Beckwith ’32 Professor of Marketing at Lehigh University. She holds a Ph.D. in Business Administration (Marketing) from the University of Missouri. Prior to pursuing her doctorate, she worked for over two years in a management consulting firm, providing services to the two largest telecommunications companies in China. Her research focuses on consumer engagement and co-creation in services marketing and digital marketing. More recently, she has explored emerging topics such as AI, digital advertising, and sharing economy. Her work has been published in leading journals including the Journal of Marketing, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Production and Operations Management, Journal of Service Research, and Decision Sciences Journal, among others. Dr. Dong has received several awards for her research, including the AMA Services Marketing SIG “Best Services Article” Award (2014), “Best Services Article Finalist” Award (2017), and the Journal of Service Research “Best Reviewer Award” (2015). She is also the recipient of Lehigh University’s Carl R. and Ingeborg Beidleman Research Award (2024) and the Melone Award (2025). She currently serves as Associate Editor of the Journal of Service Research and is a member of the Editorial Review Board for the Journal of Business Research.