My journey as a marketing scholar began in 1982. I was given a scholarship by the Ministry of Education in China to study for my MBA in the United States. Since then ，my study has changed from focusing on tangible and man-agerial matters at a micro level ，to pondering intangible and philosophical issues at a macro level. Initially ，I was heavily influenced by Philip Kotler's marketing theory. I then progressed to study the more outward-oriented American culture（categorized as ‘Yang’） and the more inward-oriented Confucianist culture （categorized as ‘Yin’） as complementary opposites for applications in branding. Next, I compared the more people-oriented Confucianist culture （categorized as‘Yang’） and the more nature-oriented Laoist culture （categorized as ‘Yin’） from a Chinese philosophical perspective. Now I devote myself to the study of the relationship between the “Action”-oriented （You Wei） American-Confucianist culture （categorized as Yang） and the “Inaction”-oriented （Wu Wei ，or“A ction according to the Principle of Inaction”） Laoist culture （categorized as Yin），in an even larger cross-cultural framework. These three cultural Yin-Yang systems and the related marketing concepts are shown in Figure 1. For the future ，I think it is important to continue to learn from non-Chinese marketing theories，but it is even more important for us to develop marketing theories rooted in the Chinese culture.

Multinational brands sometimes tailor localized content in their ads, more and more ads target their emphasis on pro-China sentiment. They may either adopt traditional Chinese element, show respect to China or advocate favorable emotions directly. Our research aimed to examine the bilateral effects of these pro-China ads: How would Chinese consumers react to brands using such ads? And on the other side, what would be the reactions from domestic consumers who share the same origin with the brand? Based on consumer-brand connections and brand relationship perspective, we proposed consumers reactions and latent mechanism behind and tested our hypotheses through a set of cross-cultural experiments. The results showed that when a target brand adopts pro-China ads, Chinese consumers react with more positive attitudes and behavior intentions, while domestic consumers revealed lower level of trust, intimacy and behavior intentions. Moreover, competitors’ adoption of such ads would also affect Chinese and domestic consumers’ reactions. Specifically, when competitors are of different origin from target brand, domestic consumers attributed target brand’s adoption of pro-China ads to environmental factors such as competition. Compared with pure exposure of target brand’s pro-China ads, domestic consumers showed increase in trust and behavior intentions towards target brand.

There is a difference between implicit and explicit attitude due to the facework in Chinese. Although existing literatures have verified some factors that affect implicit and explicit brand attitudes toward country of origin, few research study the effect of face perception. The study uses both questionnaire and IAT to measure the effect of face perception on the implicit and explicit brand attitude toward country of origin. Results show that: (1) the consumers with high face perception have a more positive explicit attitude toward Japanese/American brand, and(2) Face Perception as a moderator of the relationship between the implicit and explicit brands attitude toward of country of origin.

This research investigates how time concept influences consumers’ self-control, especially, the choice between virtue and vice. The results of two experiments reveal that unconsciously expose individuals with time concept helps them to have a better understanding of the conflict between the short-term and long-term interests, hence consumers with time concept are more likely to choose virtue versus vice. Furthermore, the impact of time concept is moderated by consumers’ current time constraint.

Consumers often make decisions relying on lucky superstitions when facing with uncontrolled marketing situations. Basing on the illusion of control theory, this paper examines consumers’ superstitious decision making. The results indicate that lucky belief and motivation level influence consumer’s superstitious decision making. When motivation level is high, compared to consumers with low lucky belief, consumers with high lucky belief have a higher likelihood making a superstitious decision. When motivation level is low, there is no significant difference between consumers with high lucky belief and those with low lucky belief. This paper not only makes valuable contributions to limited extant research in consumer superstition, but also has great implications for marketing practice.

Based on the goal system theory, this study tried to find out that whether adding an additional goal would increase or decrease the preference of means. Specifically, the dichotomy of hedonic/utilitarian characteristics of the focal goal and the additional goal was adopted to analyze the effect of additional goal on the preference of means. Three experiments were conducted to investigate the mechanism. Results showed that when the additional goal and the main goal were different in the utilitarian/hedonic attribute, because of contrast effect, adding a hedonic additional goal would enhance the preference of means and adding a utilitarian additional goal would decrease the preference of means. On the other hand, when the additional goal and the main goal were the same in the utilitarian/hedonic attribute, because of the assimilation effect, adding an additional goal which has a smaller perceived value than the main goal would enhance the preference of means and adding an additional goal which has a bigger perceived value than the main goal would decrease the preference of means.

As a new participative pricing mechanism, PWYW pricing delegates the whole price determination to consumers. Previous empirical research has showed that PWYW pricing increases sellers’ profits, even when consumers can self-determine the price, which conflicts with the basic assumption of economic man in traditional economics. Thus, some other drivers must play a role when the PWYW price is determined. Based on social preference theory, we study the influences of altruism, fairness, reciprocity, sense of guilt and price consciousness on consumers willingness to pay under PWYW pricing mechanism, the study show that reciprocity, fairness and price consciousness have a positive impact on consumer’s willingness to pay, besides, these impacts are moderated by the way of transactions.

It is of great practical and applicable value for corporation marketing to forecast and research the behavior of customer transactions. Beta-geometric/ NBD model can forecast customer’s potential purchasing according to his/her past buying behavior. However, there are some limitations in using this model due to its restricted assumptions. This paper focuses on the model’s practical application in the field of marketing, empirical analysis and model parameters optimization, as well as utilization of intermediate results to build an early loss warning methods. The empirical results show that the model have a high application value in forecasting customer’s buying behavior in China BtoC marketing related fields. This model is more suitable for the customer who has high frequency purchasing history. Relatively, the prediction outcome has certain bias for those who have low transactions frequency and stay not a long time from the first purchase. Finally, the paper discussed the applicable field and scope of the model under its assumptions and indicated the deficiencies of the model.

The authors developed a scale for customer psychological empowerment, proposed a relationship model between service fairness and customer psychological empowerment, and tested the model in bank. The results showed customer psychological empowerment included three components, which were service choice, information share, and impact. Distributive, procedural, interactive, and informational fairness had different impacts on customer psychological empowerment three components. Three components of customer psychological empowerment affected customer satisfaction differently.