Quality Assessment: PhD Dissertation Process

Last Thursday March 12th, Gabriela Balladares, PhD candidate in Innova Institute presented to the Doctoral Committee the advances in her dissertation that correspond to the work done during the second year of Doctoral Candidacy.

The working title of the dissertation is “The Role of Online Indirect Experiences in Consumer Learning”.

Some rights reserved by CHRISTOPHER DOMBRES

Let´s have a look at the dissertation´s abstract:

During the decision making process, consumers have experiences with products and services at touch points through the different marketing communication tools. As a result, consumers learn about products and services. It has been found that as more direct the experience at touch points is, the better the consumer learning outcomes will be for experience attributes and affective products’ aspects. However, there have been changes in the consumer decision making process due to the advances in the Information and Communication Technologies. The internet can approximate key elements of direct experience and for that reason we suspect that indirect experiences can be enhanced in online media. However, whether consumer learning from indirect experiences improves in online media is not clear to our knowledge. This piece of work reviews literature and theories about these topics and proposes the research design and the data collection strategy to approach the research gap using Phenomenology Research as a viewpoint. This work corresponds to the effort done during the second year of doctoral candidacy.