Consumption of live streaming or entertainment content such as video games, movies, concerts, and sports events often lasts a nontrivial time period. Where are the engaging moments of contents to consumers during the period of experience? How to capture and quantify such moments? What are the business implications of such engaging moments? Live chats ... Read More

Movies are full of highs and lows, plot twists, and bursts of action and dialogue. Understanding how viewers respond to such lively and fluctuating content in real time is challenging. In recent work, HKUST’s Wenbo Wang and colleagues developed a novel construct, “moment-to-moment synchronicity” (MTMS), to capture viewers’ engagement with dynamic movie ... Read More

Every so often, a company learns that its product has unanticipated additional benefits. For instance, the brand StriVectin found that their stretch-mark cream also had a powerful anti-wrinkle effect. Unexpected benefits might seem like a bonus, but should they be marketed as deliberate? HKUST researchers J.Christine Kim and Wenbo Wang and their colleagues ... Read More

Before any new product is launched, it must be tested. As customer reviews flow in, companies may find that they receive more than they bargained for. Customers may use a product in ways never anticipated by the brand, discovering novel benefits. How should brands harness the power of such serendipity? This was the question asked by HKUST professors J ... Read More

The latest disruptive research measures the way in which consumers of information react to that information in real time through a novel measure called moment-to-moment synchronicity (MTMS). In this presentation, Prof Wenbo WANG would share his insights on how live social media posts are analyzed in conjunction with range of other capturable variables to ... Read More

The exchange of information online has become increasingly public, and there are numerous platforms that facilitate this type of interaction. The second generation of the world wide web (known as web 2.0) allows users to collaborate and share information via social media, blogging, and web-based communities. Before this, word of mouth (WOM) used to be ... Read More

For most companies, TV remains the primary means of advertising, with commercials accounting for 40% of global advertising spending. However, increasingly, the TV industry is facing fierce competition from new media channels, as well as advances in technology that allow viewers to skip commercials all together. It is therefore imperative for the industry to ... Read More

Firms are under growing expectation by consumers to adopt sustainable practices, but when that expectation is not followed up with action and collides with price issues, it can lower the brand in consumers’ eyes and have knock-on effects on consumers’ own green behaviour. This was the finding of a study by Wenbo Wang, Aradhna Krishna and Brent McFerran ... Read More

A consumer feels unwell and decides to buy some medicine to treat the illness. The local drug store offers a choice of Western or alternative remedies (such as TCM – traditional Chinese medicine), but the consumer’s choice may depend less on the stated effects of the medicine than his or her beliefs about the illness and goals in treating it. TCM and other ... Read More