Research

Researchers have shown that the image of a brand is the most important driver of brand equity. As a multidimensional attitude construct, it is formed and developed by different branding activities. Due to this, measuring brand images is more difficult than measuring other effects of marketing activities (e.g., the increase or decrease of sales). At the same time, it is highly important for successful brand management. Against this background, our current research focuses on different approaches for measuring brand images. Furthermore, we investigate both the influence and the effects of branding activities (e.g., brand extensions, brand alliances) on brand images.

In this research area we deal, among other things, with questions such as:

• What factors drive the success and acceptance of artificial intelligence and augmented / virtual reality in marketing?
• How can the success and acceptance of artificial intelligence and augmented / virtual reality in marketing be measured and what are the relevant KPIs?
• To what extent can artificial intelligence and augmented / virtual reality revolutionize buying and selling in the future?

Digital technologies and innovations are becoming key factors in creating competitive advantages. However, the introduction of new technologies has also brought new challenges to marketing managers (Grewal et al. 2017; Lemon and Verhoef 2016). With the wide range of new products and services (expected to be) offered to consumers, firms are required to develop a solid understanding of consumers’ perceptions, evaluations, and responses towards such technologies (Inman and Nikolova 2017). While research in this domain has received enormous attention within the last years, many questions remain unsolved. 

Literature:

• Grewal, Dhruv; Roggeveen, Anne L.; Nordfält, Jens (2017): The Future of Retailing. Journal of Retailing 93 (1), pp. 1–6.
• Inman, J. Jeffrey; Nikolova, Hristina (2017): Shopper-Facing Retail Technology: A Retailer Adoption Decision Framework Incorporating Shopper Attitudes and Privacy Concerns. Journal of Retailing 93 (1), pp. 7–28.
• Lemon, Katherine N.; Verhoef, Peter C. (2016): Understanding customer experience throughout the customer journey. Journal of marketing 80 (6), pp. 69–96.

Customer experience can be conceptualized as a customer’s journey with a firm along different purchase stages, during which the customer interacts with the firm at multiple touch points (Lemon and Verhoef, 2016). Whereas, customer experience management refers to the practice of designing and reacting to all customer interactions to achieve greater customer advocacy and loyalty (Homburg et al., 2017). Delivering a unique customer experience has been proven to have positive psychological and behavioral effects on customers, which can tremendously impact business performances (Bruhn and Hadwich, 2012). Against this background, marketers and executives consider customer experience as a top business priority and, in parallel, academic researchers acknowledge it to be the most challenging topic in marketing (Lemon and Verhoef, 2016).

Literature:

• Bruhn, Manfred; Hadwich, Karsten (2012): Customer experience: Springer.
• Homburg, C., Jozić, D., & Kuehnl, C. (2017). Customer experience management: toward implementing an evolving marketing concept. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 45(3), 377-401.
• Lemon, Katherine N.; Verhoef, Peter C. (2016): Understanding customer experience throughout the customer journey. Journal of marketing 80 (6), pp. 69–96.

More than 60 years after the introduction into the literature (Brooks 1957), word-of-mouth (WOM) has been revived and given new meaning by the advent of Web 2.0 (Dellarocas 2003). The proliferation of digital technologies has enabled consumers to share their consumption-related opinions, resulting in electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM)- a "statement by potential, actual, or former customers about a product or company that is made available to a variety of individuals and institutions via the Internet" (Hennig-Thurau et al. 2004, p. 39). By now, eWOM has become an integral part of our lives. Through online communication, people come into contact with a wide range of brands on a daily basis. These developments have a strong impact on consumer behavior, as eWOM increases awareness of the brands in question (Van den Bulte and Wuyts 2009). Due to the vastness of the Internet, consumption-related communications can extend to numerous platforms and communities, and eWOM can achieve a high reach in a short period of time (King et al. 2014). Going further, because eWOM is written down, it is highly persistent and accessible indefinitely (ibid.). Research has shown that eWOM is more effective than traditional marketing tools such as face-to-face selling and even more effective than traditional advertising tools (Katz and Lazarfeld 1955). Reflecting the increase in importance, eWOM is increasingly recognized by companies as a conceivable vehicle to influence communication and is instrumentalized in terms of communication policy goals. The knowledge that companies can obtain by analyzing eWOM can be used to make marketing decisions; for example, companies can infer actual brand ratings by knowing when and why consumers share eWOM ratings.

Literature:

Brooks Jr., R. C. (1957).“Word-of-mouth” advertising in selling new products. Journal of Marketing, 22(2), 154–161.

Dellarocas, C. (2003). The digitization of word of mouth: Promise and challenges of online feedback mechanisms. Management Science, 49 (10), 1407–1424.

Hennig-Thurau, T., Gwinner, K. P., Walsh, G., & Gremler, D. D. (2004).Electronic word of mouth via consumer-opinion platforms: What motivates consumers to articulate themselves on the Internet? Journal of Interactive Marketing, 18(1), 38–52.

Katz, E., & Lazarsfeld, P. F. (2017). Personal influence: The part played by people in the flow of mass communications. Routledge.

King, R. A., Racherla, P., & Bush, V. D. (2014). What we know and don’t know about online word-of-mouth: A review and synthesis of the literature. Journal of Interactive Marketing, 28(3), 167–183.

Rosario, A. B., de Valck, K., & Sotgiu, F. (2020). Conceptualizing the electronic word-of-mouth process: What we know and need to know about eWOM creation, exposure, and evaluation. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 48(3), 422-448.

Solomon, Michael R. (2015).Consumer Behavior: Buying, Having, and Being. Engelwood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall

Van den Bulte, C., & Wuyts, S. (2009). Leveraging customer networks. The network challenge: Strategy, profit, and risk in an interlinked world, 243-258.

In this research area we deal, among other things, with questions such as:

• What are the new potentials of deep learning techniques in large-scale social media data / mobile data analysis?
• How can the success and performance of companies / brands be tracked and predicted in real-time by combining large-scale web-based data bases?
• How can social media based consumer profiling be used to generate preference-centered new product concepts?

As early as 1954, the French economist Fourastié predicted a "march towards the service society," which we can no longer escape today. In this context, we take a utility-oriented perspective dedicated to solving customer problems. The focus is on creating customer value, which is the core of service marketing. Due to recent developments in connected systems, robotics, and information and communication technology, technological services are becoming increasingly important. Therefore, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research on "smart services" forms another pillar of service marketing. Additionally, we focus on "transformative services" and examine how both traditional and intelligent services can contribute to addressing central societal issues of our time, such as physical and mental health, climate change, and participation.

In the three research areas, the following key topics, among others, are being examined:

• Customer Value: Co-Creation; Customer Participation; Service Recovery
• Smart Services: Digital Transformation; Smart Service Systems; Service Innovations; Smart Solutions
• Transformative Services: Marketing for Profit, People, and the Planet; Smart Transformative Services; Sustainability

Literatur:

• Anderson, L. & Ostrom, A.L. (2015). Transformative service research: Advancing our knowledge about service and well-being, Journal of Service Research, 18, 243-249.
• Beverungen, D., Müller, O., Matzner, M., Mendling, J., & vom Brocke, J. (2017). Conceptualizing smart service systems, Electron Markets, 29, 7-18.
• Dong, B., Evans, K. R., & Zou, S. (2008). The effects of customer participation in co-created service recovery, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 36, 123-137.
• Henkens, B., Verleye, K., & Larivière, B. (2020). The smarter, the better?! Customer well-being, engagement, and perceptions in smart service systems, International Journal of Research in Marketing, 38(2), 425-447.
• Larivière, B. & Smit, E. G. (2022). People-planet-profits for a sustainable world: integrating the triple-P idea in the marketing strategy, implementation and evaluation of service firms, Journal of Service Management, 33(4/5), 507-519.
• Raff, S., Wentzel, D., & Obwegeser, N. (2020). Smart Products: Conceptual Review, Synthesis and Research Directions, Journal of Product Innovation Management, 37 (5), 379-404.
• Zeithaml, V. A., Verleye, K., Hatak, I., Koller, M., & Zauner, A. (2020). Three Decades of Customer Value Research: Paradigmatic Roots and Future Research Avenues, Journal of Service Research,23(4), 409-432.

The advent of new digital technologies and media, such as blogs, wikis and social networks, with a continuously growing number of users (Statista, 2021), is significantly changing the way consumers seek information to reach purchase decisions. In this context, companies are confronted with promising opportunities to open up new channels of communication with customers. "Social media marketing" in this context refers to the process of disseminating websites, products or services through online channels, reaching (at low cost) a much larger audience than would be possible with traditional media (Weinberg, 2009). Gordhammer (2009) considers social media marketing to be evolving from purely "trying to sell" to "making connections" marketing, with the formation of relationships with potential customers seen as key to recurring revenue and increased brand loyalty. Interaction with customers in social networks offers companies in particular the opportunity to understand them, satisfy their needs, and in turn control and improve the response to their own activities (Assaad et al., 2011).

Literature:

• Assaad, W; Gómez, J. (2011) Social Network in marketing (Social Media Marketing) Opportunities and Risks. International Journal of Managing Public Sector Information and Communication Technologies, Vol. 2 No. 1
• Gordhammer, S. (2009). 4 ways Social Media is changing Business, https://mashable.com/2009/09/22/social-media-business/?europe=true
• Statista (2021). https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/739881/umfrage/monatlich-aktive-social-media-nutzer-weltweit/
• Weinberg, T (2009). The New Community Rules: Marketing on the Social Web. Development and Learning in Organizations, Vol. 25 No. 3

 

Bielefeld 2000plus - Forschungsprojekte zur Region

This project focused on the development of a generally accepted framework for the production of computer-based decision support systems for the marketing management of small and medium-sized enterprises. Following a transdisciplinary approach we were bundling current case studies and research results of different knowledge domains in a goal-oriented way.

Nowadays, computer-based decision support is a firm component of the operational and strategic management in many companies. In marketing planning appropriate systems can be used, e.g., for new product development, for advertising media design, as well as for the systematic directing of the sales force. In market research the efficient preparation, execution, and analysis of large data collections are hardly possible without sufficient computer support. In retailing particularly the wide spread of point-of-sale scanning and the associated availability of huge amounts of data manifest the necessity of appropriate research efforts, e.g. in the fields of data warehousing and data mining. Furthermore, the increasing importance of e-commerce, particularly in connection with the Web 2.0, offers new and complex challenges. The mentioned topics are the subject of current research and teaching to a different degree.

Please see Completed Projects

The ability to identify and to react in time on up-and-coming chances in the business environment is an indispensable factor for the future success of an organization. Our project deals with the development of autonomous systems which support the information seeking activities of managers on a daily basis. This includes the modeling of human information seeking processes and the transfer to autonomous systems, which carry out the effective and efficient search and information retrieval of weak signals covered by various textual information in a given information environment, particularly documents available on the Internet. Our research combines approaches from various areas, such as information retrieval, data and text mining, machine learning, operations research, and management science, to support managers in their competitive and business intelligence duties and responsibilities.

Data bases in market research, particularly those resulting from standardized surveys, are rarely complete. Therefore, the accurate handling of missing values is of substantial importance for the validity of the attained results. The main focus of our research efforts was concentrated on the development of suitable approaches for those missing values which are neither missing completely at random (“MCAR”) nor missing at random (“MAR”).

Machine learning is a promising research discipline that gains an increasing importance in numerous application areas. The underlying principle of learning from examples is implemented in several classes of methods, e.g. neural networks or support vector machines, and may thus be used for knowledge discovery in marketing. Meaningful applications arise from point-of-sale scanner data analysis or customer classification in sales management for instance.

The competitor’s reactions to changing market conditions are of substantial relevance for the planning of marketing measures. Since the competitive behavior is characterized by the simultaneous use of different marketing instruments the modeling of multiple discrete choices is of particular importance. Our research activities were focused on the development of methods for analyzing and anticipating competitive reactions.

A further topic of our current research concerns the development of computer-based preference measurement methods for new product planning and the improvement of existing products. Special challenges for preference measurement result from the increasing complexity of new products and the also increasing heterogeneity of many markets. Currently, among other things, we work on adaptive preference measurement approaches, which reduce the time and effort on the part of the respondents and ease the consideration of complex products. Furthermore, we investigate the decision behavior in connection with computer-based preference measurements by means of eyetracking.Furthermore, we focus on the systematic analysis of online customer reviews using econometric methods, e.g. for uncovering hidden preference patterns.

Efficient and effective sales planning is a crucial factor for successful business management. Objectives of quantitative sales planning are particularly the profit optimized alignment of sales territories or the corresponding determination of the sales force design. The main focus of our research is on the comparative examination and discussion of popular algorithms. Further research investigates whether an adaption of already successfully applied methods from different topics, e.g. machine learning, can be used in the context of sales planning. Beyond, the increasing globalization of markets and the resulting reorganization of sales management are taken into account within the framework of quantitative sales planning.

Feb. 1996 - Dec. 1998

Jan. 1999 - Dec. 2001

March 2003 - Oct. 2004

March 2004 - February 2006

Application of conjoint analysis as a marketing research tool to the development and control of future academic library services

in collaboration with the Bielefeld University Library

In this project we developed a comprehensive analysis and simulation framework for academic libraries, which enables a founded strategic planning of future service design on the basis of preference measurement (using conjoint analysis). Here, we took into account both services that were already available and potential ones that did not exist till then. The framework was deduced from an empirical study that was organized and carried out together with the Bielefeld University Library, and it was made publicly available by means of an appropriate guideline. Its portability was audited in cooperation with the University of Cottbus. An intensive exchange of information with the Johns Hopkins University, USA, completed the project.

www.dfg.de

Aug. 2004 - July 2007

The “BWL in OWL” project, which was granted by the Robert Bosch Stiftung, focused at an increasing cooperation between high schools and universities on the field of business education. It aimed at the collective development and realization of concepts to facilitate the successful transition from high school to university for those who are interested in business studies. The cooperation between the Bielefeld University’s Faculty of Business Administration and Economics, the Friedrich-List-Berufskolleg Herford, and the Rudolf-Rempel-Berufskolleg Bielefeld (both high schools are explicitly focusing on business administration) provided an efficient and effective way to develop relevant arrangements. The project comprised three complementary modules.

The first one, “Organisationsangebot zum Studium der BWL“, should give the high school students an idea of what the everyday life of a university student looks like. For this purpose professors of business administration from the Bielefeld University frequently gave lectures at the cooperating high schools on current topics of business administration and management. In addition, the high school students, on their part, had the opportunity to visit basic lectures at Bielefeld University. In order to consolidate the topics discussed in these lectures, supporting tutorials were offered. To ensure a meaningful complement regarding the given curriculum at the high schools the topics to be covered in the lectures were collectively determined by representatives of all institutions. Moreover, the high school students were trained in applying scientific methods of information retrieval at the university library. Upon completion this phase of the project they received a “driver’s licence for the library”, which certificates successful participation. Beyond that the high school students got the opportunity of receiving a university library card which provides them with the access to the available media, e.g. for preparing their exams or papers at school.

The second module, “Lehrende im Dialog”, enabled the teachers of the cooperating schools to receive information on current business research. In the sub-module “Treffpunkt BWL” the teachers had the chance to discuss in detail topics of interest with the involved professors from the Bielefeld University. The insights gained through these meetings can be used to enhance future courses at school by integrating them into the regular curriculum.

The third module, “Einblicke in die betriebswirtschaftliche Forschung”, builded upon the first two. Here the high school students were confronted with real case studies to learn and practice scientific methods in business administration. Doing so the high school students got an idea of the benefits of theoretical models, which are highly important in business research, and of how they can be applied.

The highlight of the common activities between the university and both schools was the summer school which took place once a year. The summer school was open for those high school students who were significantly interested in specialising their existing economical knowledge and who had proven their subject-related interests in earlier steps of the project. During the summer school the high school students were working in teams, and guided by coaches, on real economical problems. A main subject of the summer school was the participation in a computer-based business game. In this way, the high school students got a feeling of what it means to make “real” business decisions. Beyond that they were enabled to understand the necessity of goal-oriented communication between partners and the willingness to compromise.

Robert Bosch Stiftung

July 2007 - Dec. 2008

An empirical study on the attractiveness of East Westfalia for specialists and executive staff with a special focus on the family friendliness.

Due to the increasing competition for skilled professionals and the general demographic developments the topic of "family friendliness" has gained increasing importance in the different regions of Germany, both from a social and an economic point of view. With regard to an improvement of the competitive strengths of East Westfalia, our study aimed to analyze and evaluate the family friendliness of the municipalities in this region. The study was conducted in collaboration with Bielefeld 2000plus. External cooperation partners were the CCI East Westfalia in Bielefeld and the Bertelsmann Foundation.

Dec. 2007 - Nov. 2009

BWL in OWL II – „Deutung und Analyse betriebswirtschaftlicher Phänomene“

There is no English translation available at the moment. For further details please look at the German version.

The importance of understanding consumer brand preferences is widely confirmed in marketing research and practice. We propose that promising data sources that can be used for the measurement task at hand are online forums, particularly in the form of online stores with feedback options. In this project we develop a simple methodology for determining the effects attributes have on the products’ overall evaluation in view of future product improvement or new product development. The basic idea behind our approach is that each product review (consumer opinion) can be represented by a combination of positively (the “pros”) and negatively (the “cons”) valued characteristics, completed by an overall evaluation of the product.

For the empirical analysis we collect a large set of online product reviews posted in four western countries (US, UK, Germany and France) and in three different languages to investigate similarities and differences in the opinion patterns resulting from cross-brand and cross-border comparisons. Special emphasize is put on the relationships between the strength and direction of the effect the brand name has on the product rating or the willingness-to-recommend the product and the country the review originates from. The study aims to discover the existence of general patterns, that can be helpful when developing global product strategies, and of country- or brand-specific patterns requiring case-specific approaches to new product development.

• Preference Measurement in the Automotive Industry
• Marketing and Market Research for Sheltered Workshops
• B2B Sales Management in the Hightech-Industry