DONG Songting, a doctoral student in Tsinghua SEM’s Department of Marketing, was invited to join Australian National University (ANU) as Research Fellow in Marketing and Lecturer of Marketing, December 2009.

Since established in 1946, ANU is known as a research oriented university, located in Canberra. The ranking of ANU in the Times Higher Education Supplement is 16th in the world for 3 straight years since 2006. DONG Songting was hired by ANU’s School of Management, Marketing and International Business under the College of Business and Economics. The offer was made during his campus visit to ANU.

In the history of Tsinghua SEM, Songting is the first domestic doctoral student offered a job in a world-class university. It is a rare case even for Tsinghua University and other institutes in China.

Professor ZHAO Ping (front) and Dr. DONG Songting (back)

Research and Publications

DONG Songting was tutored by Professor ZHAO Ping in Tsinghua SEM and Professor DING Min in Pennsylvania State University (PSU). ZHAO Ping sent Songting to PSU for 17 months during Songting’s Ph.D. program, where Songting started to work with DING Min and other world class scholars such as Josh Eliashberg from Wharton, John Hauser from MIT, Joel Huber from Duke and Rajdeep Grewal from PSU. Songting said: “Professor ZHAO Ping and Professor DING Min have taught me many things in terms of both personality and research. If I could be up to something, I would thank my advisors for that. I am also very grateful to my co-authors. I learnt a lot working with them, and they offered great help to find me a job”.

Main research areas of DONG Songting include “incentive-aligned data collection methods” and “customer loyalty measurement and modeling.” In the doctoral dissertation, he created an incentive-aligned method (Repurchase Acceleration, RA) to measure customer loyalty, which accelerates customers’ repurchase behaviors to measure the likelihood of repurchase. With this method, researchers and managers could collect behavioral type of loyalty data in real time, which, as Songting deems, is of both theoretical and practical potential.

Currently, DONG Songting has one paper published inInternational Journal of Research in Marketing, other two under the second round review atJournal of Marketing ResearchandInternational Journal of Research in Marketing. Three of his other projects target leading journals in marketing, such asJournal of Marketing Research,Marketing Science, andManagement Science.

Learning at Tsinghua SEM

DONG Songting was born in Fenghua, Zhejiang Province. He went into Tsinghua SEM in 2000, majoring in Information Management and Information Systems. He believes the economy relates to everyone’s life and is a great field for him to serve the country and the people. Besides, the all-in-one curriculum, covering economics, management, mathematics and computer science, is highly appealing to him.

Songting said: he chose a career in the academia because he sees his own capabilities in it, and he enjoys the free flowing of thoughts. Making money, according to him, is not his way to prove himself.

DONG Songting likes to quote from his supervisor, Professor ZHAO Ping: “Being a good person first, then a good researcher.” He said, what he learnt from ZHAO Ping is not only research methods, but also, more importantly, the moral disciplines upheld by his tutor.

Education for the World

Since most universities in China tend to employ Ph.D.s with overseas degrees, domestic doctoral students are facing increasingly fierce challenges to be hired in universities.

Professor ZHAO Ping has been trying for new breakthroughs in the education of doctoral students since several years ago. He ascribed Songting’s success to three facts below:

First, institutions should hold their doctoral education up to first-class international standards, so the students could be capable to compete in the same arena with graduates from top schools like Harvard and MIT. In this respect, Songting’s success is a result of his diligence and efforts in Tsinghua SEM.

Second, the School invited world class scholars from all over the world to give courses to the Ph.D. students, so students could be exposed to the frontier of research, which may not be available in domestic universities for now.

Third, the university provided opportunities of international collaborative studies for Ph.D. students, so they can know more about the way researches are done outside China, and how papers get published in leading journals. Finding appropriate foreign supervisors will be very helpful. To find a perfect match between a student’s knowledge structure and the foreign supervisor’s research interests can be critical for this kind of co-advising. Professor ZHAO Ping thinks Songting is lucky to have Professor DING Min in PSU because they matched very well.