Matthew Grimes - Cambridge Judge Business School

“Given unprecedented challenges facing our society today such as climate change, pandemic, and inequality, it is very exciting and important to study how firms can make a positive difference and drive sustainability transitions to achieve the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs). This Tony Cowling Foundation Award gives us an opportunity to explore a novel dataset of global companies’ product and operational alignment to the 17 UN SDGs.”

Research goals

Why do companies narrow or broaden their UN SDG engagement and what would be implications to firm performance (including financial performance, sustainability performance, sustainability impact, and sustainability reputation)?

Why do some firms engage in rainbow-washing––communicating their commitment to SDGs more than actually implementing sustainability practices, whereas others might do the opposite (do not publicly commit to any UN SDGs but align their products and operations with one or several SDGs i.e., engaging in strategic silence)?

How does the degree of rainbow-washing and strategic silence have implications on firms’ financial performance?

Marketing outcome

For the market research industry: provide insight into how markets and stakeholders within those markets are responding to organizations’ efforts to engage with the UN SDGs.

For companies: inform organizations on how they can effectively respond to and take the lead in addressing complex social and environmental problems at scale. More specifically, the insights will help companies understand pros and cons of designing holistic solutions, which have the capacity to address societal grand challenges.

For investors and other stakeholders: create deepened understanding about the conditions under which disclosed corporate sustainability information is more likely to be symbolic and the conditions under which such information might reflect strong sustainability practices.

For regulators and policy makers: how to design incentives.

Lucia Reisch - Cambridge Judge Business School

Urgent global actions are required to address the problem of climate change and reduce its risks for people and ecosystems. A large gap exists between the support needed and the effective actions taken. Climate mitigation is particularly challenging at the individual and collective levels since it requires fundamental changes to how people make decisions, including changes in consumption patterns and energy use.

In exploring the intersection of individual beliefs and global climate action, our focus merges psychology with urgency. The literature emphasises how personal beliefs shape green consumer choices, yet the scale of climate change demands a collective response. Understanding individuals’ beliefs and perceptions of others' commitment to climate actions is crucial to communicating the urgency of climate change, highlighting the tangible benefits of climate-friendly actions, and implementing policies that incentivise sustainable practices. My enthusiasm stems from uncovering the impact of such beliefs and investigating if viewing others as reluctant to prioritise the future leads to fatalistic attitudes toward green products. By emphasising the human ability to change, we hypothesise that we can inspire a positive shift in consumer behaviour, fostering a greater willingness to engage in environmentally conscious actions.

Research goals

How do attributions of climate inaction to different versions of present bias influence sustainable consumer choices?

Marketing outcome

This project enables marketing practitioners and policy makers to develop effective communication and targeted interventions to encourage behaviour change and promote sustainable practices by advancing the understanding of the underlying psychological barriers to green consumer choices and limited support for green policies. This could have significant implications for the transition to green economies and the mitigation of climate change.

Joon Kim - Cambridge Judge Business School

"The emergence of large language models and generative AI represents a significant milestone in the field of artificial intelligence. As AI rapidly becomes more proficient in a wide range of tasks, there is a growing interest within the research community in exploring how these powerful technologies can be harnessed to enhance human efficiency and productivity. However, while productivity gains are important, they do not represent the full scope or the most intriguing implication of generative AI. What sets these new generative AI systems apart from other machines is their potential to engage in activities traditionally considered unique to humans, such as creativity."

The primary objective of my research is to address three key questions: (1) whether human-AI collaboration benefits or hinders creativity, (2) who benefits the most from such collaborations (for example, do creative individuals derive more creative insights than less creative ones from human-AI partnerships?), and (3) how to create a conducive environment where human-AI collaboration leads to enhanced creativity.

The support from the Tony Cowling Foundation greatly facilitates my ongoing research efforts to answer these questions. My research, backed by the Tony Cowling Foundation, will have a significant impact as it provides a scientific understanding of how AI systems can contribute to enhancing the creativity of human societies.

“The goal is to create an image-based personality assessment, where the images are automatically generated through an AI. A future application could be a world where ads are automatically created for each individual – and true 1-2-1 marketing world.”

For market researchers who want to segment consumers, it can be useful to measure their personality differences. Picture-based tests are one fun way to measure personality, but the downside is that they're expensive to create and validate across cultures, demographics and time. This project will use new image generation AI technologies to test whether a computer can create an image-based personality test. Does the AI understand personality well enough to create personalized appealing images?

We are extremely grateful to the Tony Cowling Foundation for this project and for their inputs into how to make it a success.

David Reiner - Cambridge Judge Business School

“Most debates over social media exist within ‘bubbles’ that are well-known to amplify disinformation, but these debates often are carried out with little reference to the wider public. The goal is to understand how the wider public perceive social media debates.”

We have done studies analysing social media posts and separately carried out representative public surveys, but this is the first time we have tried to combine the two. Given the concerns over echo chambers and moving beyond your own information bubble, we hope that this funding will help us to make a useful contribution to the study of the spread of disinformation as we explore how online ecosystems interact with the wider public in the climate change debate – for example does a viral tweet from an online community resonate with the wider public.

“The goal is to develop mentor matching programs for micro entrepreneurs in developing markets and contribute to the emerging theory of marketing in informal sectors.”

Small scale, micro-entrepreneurs in emerging markets face considerable challenges in starting and scaling their businesses. Often a major obstacle is the lack of appropriate mentoring and training for them. A major challenge is effectively matching mentors to micro-entrepreneurs.

We are studying how to bridge the gap by developing an algorithm for successful mentor matching through digitising and analysing rich data and insights on micro-entrepreneurs and mentors garnered from surveys, interviews, field experiments.

We are grateful to Tony Cowling Foundation for their support with this research project. We believe the project has the potential to make a big difference to the sustainable livelihoods of millions. The implications of this project are significant for the design of mentorship programmes and training, and policy around driving bottom-up creation of micro-entrepreneurial ecosystems.

Jaideep Prabhu - Cambridge Judge Business School

Soniya Gupta-Rawal - Cambridge Judge Business School PhD student

"Examining the impact of visual design on consumer attitudes and behaviour with particular reference to fashion and interior design industries – building a model where choice language is imprecise and choice factors highly variable."

“We're excited to develop a new approach for predicting customer attention, customizing, and optimizing visual product/content designs using computer vision, machine learning, and preference modelling methods.

With the support of the Tony Cowling Foundation, we are able to collect a rich set of consumer data including eye gaze sequences and physiological responses (e.g., facial expression, heart rate, and galvanic skin response). This allows us to get a deeper and more comprehensive understanding of how consumers process visual product/content information and make decisions in visual-intensive marketing contexts.”

Christos Genakos - Cambridge Judge Business School

"Quantifying the relationship between competition and price dispersion in homogeneous product markets – including isolating the impact of search."

“Exploring and understanding human behaviour is fascinating. This project will allow us to answer an old question, price dispersion, in a unique new environment and to shed light on its underlying key mechanisms at play.

The advent of the internet and price comparison websites were thought to have lowered search costs for consumers, yet both the level of prices and price dispersion still remain relatively high. This research aims to explore why.

Ahmed Khwaja - Cambridge Judge Business School

Jaideep Prabhu - Cambridge Judge Business School

Sonal Srivastava - PhD students - Cambridge Judge Business School

"Studying food consumption habits to improve the understanding of the link between diet and public health – time series modelling of short and long term predictive factors."

Along with our PhD student Sonal Srivastava, Professor Khwaja and I are delighted to be working with one of the leading UK meal kit retailers to study the nutritional and food behaviour of consumers, especially during the pandemic. Using consumer choice data over time enables us to apply and combine cutting edge machine learning techniques along with more traditional econometric models to understand how consumers' nutritional behaviour changed during lockdowns.

Understanding consumption behaviour of different segments will also help us in evaluating what nudging strategies are most effective in moving consumers towards healthy diets.