Faculty Focus - Mona Sinha

Marketing - Consumer Relationship Management

BY GEENA LAWRENCE

KENNESAW, Ga. (June 2020) — Mona Sinha has eight years of corporate experience in the consumer products and music/entertainment industry. Now, as an  associate professor in the Department of Marketing  and Professional Sales in KSU's Coles College of Business, her industry experiences inform her research.   

“My corporate experience was in India and centered in many ways on customer relationships. One question that fascinated me early on was how technology was changing the way companies create and maintain customer relationships,” said Sinha. “This led me to one of the key negative implications of using technology to better understand consumers – compromising consumer privacy.” 

That research, examining how privacy concerns impede adoption of mobile payment technology in India, resulted in a journal article. Titled "Mobile Payments in India: The Privacy Factor,"  the article was published in the International Journal of Bank Marketing in 2019.  

Sinha, who earned her Ph.D. in Marketing from Texas A&M University, is now working on three papers focused on consumer privacy concerns. “In one paper I am studying why people claim that they care about privacy and would like to protect it but do very little to actually protect their privacy,” she explained. “For example, despite knowing that being on social media compromises their privacy, social media usage is very high.”  
 
Sinha has teamed up with co-authors from her department: David Burns, chair and professor, and Jennifer Hutchins, associate professor, on two other papers on consumer privacy. In one paper, they examine how consumers’ attitudes towards their privacy has changed over the last decade. In another paper, they compare how consumers’ in the United States, India and Mexico differ in terms of their privacy concerns. 

Through their research, Burns, Hutchins, and Sinha hope to help companies better understand the underlying motivations of consumers with concerns about the acquisition, protection, and usage of their data by companies. They also want to explore how companies can respect their consumers’ privacy rights while collecting and using their data.    

Before joining KSU in 2013,  Sinha was a post-doctoral research fellow at Emory University  and  worked at the Harvard Business School India Research Center.  Born in India, she grew up in several countries including Thailand and Kenya. 

Given her varied background and work experience, Sinha is very interested in marketing in emerging markets. She has published a book, Breakout Strategies for Emerging Markets: Business and Marketing Tactics for Achieving Growth, and a related paper, "Growing the Pie in Emerging Markets: Marketing Strategies for Increasing the Ratio of Non-Users to Users," in the Journal of Business Research. 

Sinha is also interested in sustainability issues. One of her articles, "B2B Branding in Emerging Markets: A Sustainability Perspective," focused on the need for companies practicing sustainability when they market in emerging markets. That research was published in the Industrial Marketing Management journal in 2015. 

Sinha has also published several case studies for the Harvard Business School on a variety of topics such as branding, sustainability, and distribution. One of her most well-known case studies, "The Dabbawala System – On-Time Delivery, Every Time," is about a lunch delivery service in Mumbai. She said this case study is particularly thought-provoking because it focuses on human connections and demonstrates how technology is not always needed for building great customer relationships.