August 18, 2022

The Graduate College is pleased to announce that Mithila Guha, PhD candidate in quantitative marketing in the LeBow College of Business, won the highly competitive "Best in Track" paper award in the "Digital and Social media Marketing Track" at this year's American Marketing Association Summer Academic Conference in Chicago (August 12-14, 2022). The conference selects a "Best in Track" paper award for each of the 14 tracks, inviting competitive papers from academic scholars representing 33 countries and six continents. Mithila received support to attend the conference and present her work through the Graduate College's Teck-Kah Lim Graduate Student Domestic Travel Subsidy Award. Mithila's paper, "Peer effects on Brand Activism: Evidence from Brand and User Chatter on Twitter", co-authored with Dr. Daniel Korschun, department head, associate professor and Stephen Cozen Research Scholar in Marketing, was selected from 35 other papers within her track. The theme of this year’s conference was “Light in the Darkness: Marketing’s Role in Driving Positive Change."

Mithila also presented her work at the 2022 Drexel Emerging Graduate Scholars Conference in April as part of the Three Minute Thesis (3MT®) Competition. You can watch a recording of her 3MT on YouTube.

From the conference website: "The Digital and Social Media Marketing Track aims to understand the impact of social media and digital platforms and technologies on the behaviors of consumers, firms, brands, public policy, and society at large. As well, this track aims to understand their implications for marketing actions, especially in the COVID-19 Pandemic era and beyond. This track invites papers on a wide range of topics related to digital and social media marketing that includes: Customer engagement on different digital platforms, Impacts of new technologies and digital channels on consumer behavior and marketing strategies, Relationship between social media and branding, Social media use and implications for international marketing, Impact of new technologies on Covid-19 policies, behaviors, and information spread, The role of online reviews on decision making, Using social media for social impact, Mobile marketing and geo-targeting, Big data and marketing analytics in the digital world, Consumer sentiment analysis and social media marketing, Consumer privacy concerns online, Impact of social media, digital technologies, and new tech on consumer well-being, beliefs surrounding fake news and its implications for policies, consumer behavior, and marketing, implications of crowdsourcing for marketing and policy, user-generated vs. firm-generated content, customer care on digital and social media (vs. traditional) platforms, the role of AI, chatbots, and VR for the future of marketing."

Mithila's research interests include digital and social media marketing, brand management and online strategies and text analytics. Mithila is currently teaching an undergraduate course this summer, MKTG 322: Advertising & Integrated Marketing Communications, in the LeBow College of Business. Learn more about Mithila by visiting her website.

The Teck-Kah Lim Graduate Student Domestic Travel Subsidy Award, which was created in 2016, is funded in part by a generous donation from Teck-Kah Lim, Ph.D., former Associate Vice Provost for Graduate Studies and Professor Emeritus in the Department of Physics, to provide more opportunities for graduate students to travel to present at meetings and conferences, often when they have little or no other support to do so and to further advance Drexel's research enterprise. The subsidy award also provides an opportunity for graduate students to develop important presentation, networking, and professional development skills. Click here to read more about the travel subsidy award.

Congratulations Mithila on this prestigious award!