Ishita Chakraborty, Thomas and Charlene Landsberg Smith Faculty Fellow and an assistant professor of marketing at the Wisconsin School of Business, is a recipient of the 2023 American Marketing Association’s (AMA) Marketing Research SIG Don Lehmann Award for Best Dissertation-Based Article.
Chakraborty is a co-winner with June Shi, assistant professor of marketing at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.
Chakraborty’s early dissertation work and resulting article, “Attribute Sentiment Scoring with Online Text Reviews: Accounting for Language Structure and Missing Attributes,” looks at online restaurant reviews using Yelp data, mining text phrases for attributes of the consumer’s restaurant experience, such as the type of food ordered and its price.
“My research team realized that we didn’t need to limit ourselves to just looking at the numerical rating, but we could actually start analyzing in real time the text people were writing,” says Chakraborty. “That really opened up a new Pandora’s box of questions.”
Her study examined diners’ motivation to leave restaurant reviews across three main categories: status seeking, a need to vent or praise, and altruism.
“There’s really a lot to learn from consumer silence,” Chakraborty says. “We want to correctly interpret how a customer actually felt about any missing attributes to help obtain the proper rating. To do that, it helps to understand why reviewers are leaving reviews in the first place.”
AMA’s Marketing Research Special Interest Group (SIG) established the Don Lehmann Award in 1997, which honors the best dissertation-based article recently published in the Journal of Marketing or Journal of Marketing Research.
Chakraborty’s article has earned significant acclaim prior to the Don Lehmann Award. She won the Academy of Marketing Science Mary Kay Doctoral Dissertation Award in 2022 and received an honorable mention in 2021 for the John A. Howard/American Marketing Association Dissertation Award.
Her research interests include digital marketing, online platforms, text and video analytics, and mobile apps. She earned a bachelor’s degree in computer engineering at the University of Mumbai, a master’s in business administration from the Indian Institute of Management, and a PhD in marketing at the Yale School of Management. Prior to pursuing doctoral work at Yale, she worked in sales, brand management, and consulting with Deloitte, Accenture, and Mondelez International.
Founded in 1937, the AMA is a community of future marketers and dedicated professionals who work, teach, and study in the field to advance the field of marketing. The organization publishes the academic journals Journal of Marketing, Journal of Public Policy & Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, and Journal of International Marketing.