Research Areas of the Marketing & Sales Research Group

Marketing Strategy	Marketing Methods	Sales Management
Current Projects: Culture of innovation. Organizational culture is increasingly identified both by scholars and companies as a main driver of innovation. This research focuses on the conceptualization of culture of innovation and related concepts, issues of causality of its drivers and outcomes and its relation to national culture. These questions are investigated in a series of empirical studies. For further information please contact: Verena Rieger Exploring the departmental cultures of marketing, sales, and R&D. To enable innovation, marketing, sales, and R&D departments need to coordinate their activities. When this cross-functional integration of activities fails, practitioners and academics often point to cultural differences between departments as culprit. In this research project we empirically describe the departmental cultures of marketing, sales, and R&D. Our sample uses data from Germany, France, Russia, and China. For further information please contact: Martin Klarmann Pricing of new products. Developing an appropriate pricing strategy for new products is challenging, but imperative for successful market launch. Practitioners often wrongly assume that appropriating value is not an issue once value has been created in the first place. This research project relates to the following key questions: (1) How do consumers perceive launch prices of new products, that is, how can firms price new products for consumer acceptance, and (2) how should firms organize the internal process of developing a pricing strategy for new products? Central methodological approaches are lab experiments along with analyses of variance and multiple regression analyses, and structural equation modeling. For further information, please contact: Sven Feurer Completed Projects: Marketing innovations. Marketing Innovations are marketing activities that are perceived as new by the market. Thus, the innovation relates not to the product core but to pricing, communication, sales, branding and/or packaging. This research focuses on drivers and outcomes of marketing innovations with two different studies. In context of the “Case Survey” -method, several experts for a real case are being surveyed, allowing a generalizable, cross-sectional analysis of the subject. The “Event Study” - method allows conclusions about the effect on the market value. For further information please contact: Manuel Hütter Salespeople’s role in new product development. Salespeople’s reluctance to sell innovations is a crucial cause why new product introductions fail or new SFA systems are not used efficiently. In this dissertation project we want to investigate the role of the sales force in the innovation process and the new product development. Furthermore, we examine the importance of salesperson innovation adoption. Central methodological approaches are meta-analytic structural equation modeling, factor analysis, and multilevel regression. Further information can be found here.	Current Projects: Leveraging User-Generated Content to Automate Brand Preference Measurements. Marketing managers are currently under increasing pressure and have to change how they are perceived within organizations. They seek to move from a cost center towards a value center that manages value generating assets like brands, which ultimately influence the financial firm performance. However, measuring and managing these primarily intangible assets (e.g. Brand Equity and Customer Equity) with traditional market research methodologies is expensive, complicated and time-consuming. In this research, we want to explore how web-based data sources (e.g. product reviews, blogs, forums or social networks) could be analyzed with novel Text Mining approaches from the Information System research stream to automated brand preference measurements, which allows marketing managers a continuous tracking of their brand performance. Our goal is to automated the identification of product attributes (functional and non-functional) that are relevant for consumer purchase decisions, derive their utility levels and compare the outcome with Choice-based Conjoint results on an aggregated Level. For further information, please contact: Tobias Roelen-Blasberg Print publications and their websites: Cannibalization or synergies? This research project examines the interrelation of print and online media with regard to cannibalization and synergy effects. It takes two-sided market effects explicitly into account and focuses on magazines/newspapers and their companion websites. After almost twenty years of coexistence and transparent market information this research project is backed by a comparably comprehensive set of data. A Vector Autoregression Analyses assesses the drivers and factors of companion websites that promote print usage and advertising sales. For further information please contact: Yasmin Merz Internet marketing analytics: How do they affect customer wellbeing? More and more consumers purchase products and services online. This creates truly „Big Data“ for firms that can observe search and shopping behavior in an unprecedented manner. However these possibilities for collecting and analyzing data make customers increasingly uncomfortable. Moreover, they seem to negate the initial promise of customer empowerment through the Internet. In this research project, we try to analyze how Internet usage and consumer wellbeing are connected. We will then turn to understand whether and how online marketing practices influence a potential relationship. For further information please contact: Martin Klarmann Collective database for studies on TV advertising effectiveness. Google adwords and related online advertising tools provide instant information about the return on advertising investment. This has created an increased need for also understanding outcomes of more traditional forms of advertising. In this project financed by Wirkstoff TV, the association of German TV stations, we seek to establish a database aggregating data on TV advertising effectiveness collected from German TV stations, academics, and TV advertisers. For further information please look here. Completed Projects: Validating the price-quality map. The price-quality-map appears to be one of the most frequently employed strategic tools in marketing, particularly pricing. However, nobody knows if the implicit assumptions made when employing the map hold true. We conduct a series of empirical studies to test the validity of this major strategic tool. For further information please contact: Sophie Fleischmann	Current Projects: Cross functional integration of marketing, sales, and R&D Motivated by customer demands, growing competition, and an erosion of product margins, many production-oriented firms in industrialized environments have started a transformation process from offering exclusively products or services to selling solutions over the last years. Cross-functional integration is regarded as a key success factor for solution providers. Nevertheless, one of the most challenging (and potentially frustrating) aspects of modern life as a marketer can be the cooperation between marketing and other functions such as R&D or sales caused by differences between the departmental thought worlds. To break down these barriers, this research project empirically investigates various facets of thought-world differences and their effects on cross-functional integration. Furthermore, the research project assesses the impact of integrating the R&D, marketing, and sales functions across the four stages of the solution selling process on the solution orientation of a firm. For further information, please contact: Sabine Mark Value selling. It is a common recommendation that successful salespeople emphasize the economic value of their offering in customer conversations. In this research project, we analyze value selling empirically. How can value selling be measured empirically? What are prerequisites? Is value selling really linked to beneficial performance outcomes, even if other types of salesperson behavior are controlled for? Using a sample of more than 200 B2B salespeople we seek answers to these questions. For further information please contact: Martin Klarmann or Marc Wouters Consumer ethnocentrism. Consumers showing ethnocentric tendencies contribute to barriers to international market entry. However, identifying these consumers remains difficult for firms. This research applies configurational theory to shed light on consumer ethnocentrism and its antecedents. The central methodological approach is fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA). For further information, please contact: Sven Feurer Completed Projects: Salesperson relationship in the digital network age. The analysis of customer-salesperson relationships has received much research attention in the past decade. However, we look at the salesperson’s perspective of such relationships. Two major topics are studied. (1) Does feeling committed to a specific customer as well as to the employer create divided loyalties? What are drivers and outcomes? (2) How can salespeople effectively use social media? Is it already an important tool for personal selling? What are future potentials? Further information can be found here Pricing for prestige brands. The price of a product is both a sacrifice and an information indicator. Particularly, prestige brands use a premium pricing strategy to signal exclusivity, status, conspicuousness and quality to the customer. Despite the risk of damaging brand image, price promotions are used across all brand categories. This thesis studies the effects of price promotions on brand perception and purchase intention of prestigious brands. Specifically this thesis considers consumer heterogeneity with regard to their individual motivation for purchasing prestigious brands and their perception with regards to price. Further information can be found here Drivers and outcomes of price complexity. Sellers often use complex price presentations to convey tariff information to consumers. In this research project we compare customer responses to complex prices between different service types: airlines, banking, electricity, health clubs, and mobile communication. We conduct a series of experimental studies to investigative the role of price complexity in tariff choice situations. Further Information can be found here

Marketing Strategy

Marketing Methods

Sales Management

Current Projects:

Culture of innovation. Organizational culture is increasingly identified both by scholars and companies as a main driver of innovation. This research focuses on the conceptualization of culture of innovation and related concepts, issues of causality of its drivers and outcomes and its relation to national culture. These questions are investigated in a series of empirical studies. For further information please contact: Verena Rieger

Exploring the departmental cultures of marketing, sales, and R&D. To enable innovation, marketing, sales, and R&D departments need to coordinate their activities. When this cross-functional integration of activities fails, practitioners and academics often point to cultural differences between departments as culprit. In this research project we empirically describe the departmental cultures of marketing, sales, and R&D. Our sample uses data from Germany, France, Russia, and China. For further information please contact: Martin Klarmann

Pricing of new products. Developing an appropriate pricing strategy for new products is challenging, but imperative for successful market launch. Practitioners often wrongly assume that appropriating value is not an issue once value has been created in the first place. This research project relates to the following key questions: (1) How do consumers perceive launch prices of new products, that is, how can firms price new products for consumer acceptance, and (2) how should firms organize the internal process of developing a pricing strategy for new products? Central methodological approaches are lab experiments along with analyses of variance and multiple regression analyses, and structural equation modeling. For further information, please contact: Sven Feurer

Completed Projects:

Marketing innovations. Marketing Innovations are marketing activities that are perceived as new by the market. Thus, the innovation relates not to the product core but to pricing, communication, sales, branding and/or packaging. This research focuses on drivers and outcomes of marketing innovations with two different studies. In context of the “Case Survey” -method, several experts for a real case are being surveyed, allowing a generalizable, cross-sectional analysis of the subject. The “Event Study” - method allows conclusions about the effect on the market value. For further information please contact: Manuel Hütter

Salespeople’s role in new product development. Salespeople’s reluctance to sell innovations is a crucial cause why new product introductions fail or new SFA systems are not used efficiently. In this dissertation project we want to investigate the role of the sales force in the innovation process and the new product development. Furthermore, we examine the importance of salesperson innovation adoption. Central methodological approaches are meta-analytic structural equation modeling, factor analysis, and multilevel regression. Further information can be found here.

Current Projects:

Leveraging User-Generated Content to Automate Brand Preference Measurements.
Marketing managers are currently under increasing pressure and have to change how they are perceived within organizations. They seek to move from a cost center towards a value center that manages value generating assets like brands, which ultimately influence the financial firm performance. However, measuring and managing these primarily intangible assets (e.g. Brand Equity and Customer Equity) with traditional market research methodologies is expensive, complicated and time-consuming. In this research, we want to explore how web-based data sources (e.g. product reviews, blogs, forums or social networks) could be analyzed with novel Text Mining approaches from the Information System research stream to automated brand preference measurements, which allows marketing managers a continuous tracking of their brand performance. Our goal is to automated the identification of product attributes (functional and non-functional) that are relevant for consumer purchase decisions, derive their utility levels and compare the outcome with Choice-based Conjoint results on an aggregated Level. For further information, please contact:

Tobias Roelen-Blasberg

Print publications and their websites: Cannibalization or synergies? This research project examines the interrelation of print and online media with regard to cannibalization and synergy effects. It takes two-sided market effects explicitly into account and focuses on magazines/newspapers and their companion websites. After almost twenty years of coexistence and transparent market information this research project is backed by a comparably comprehensive set of data. A Vector Autoregression Analyses assesses the drivers and factors of companion websites that promote print usage and advertising sales. For further information please contact: Yasmin Merz

Internet marketing analytics: How do they affect customer wellbeing? More and more consumers purchase products and services online. This creates truly „Big Data“ for firms that can observe search and shopping behavior in an unprecedented manner. However these possibilities for collecting and analyzing data make customers increasingly uncomfortable. Moreover, they seem to negate the initial promise of customer empowerment through the Internet. In this research project, we try to analyze how Internet usage and consumer wellbeing are connected. We will then turn to understand whether and how online marketing practices influence a potential relationship. For further information please contact: Martin Klarmann

Collective database for studies on TV advertising effectiveness. Google adwords and related online advertising tools provide instant information about the return on advertising investment. This has created an increased need for also understanding outcomes of more traditional forms of advertising. In this project financed by Wirkstoff TV, the association of German TV stations, we seek to establish a database aggregating data on TV advertising effectiveness collected from German TV stations, academics, and TV advertisers. For further information please look here.

Completed Projects:

Validating the price-quality map. The price-quality-map appears to be one of the most frequently employed strategic tools in marketing, particularly pricing. However, nobody knows if the implicit assumptions made when employing the map hold true. We conduct a series of empirical studies to test the validity of this major strategic tool. For further information please contact: Sophie Fleischmann

Current Projects:

Cross functional integration of marketing, sales, and R&D
Motivated by customer demands, growing competition, and an erosion of product margins, many production-oriented firms in industrialized environments have started a transformation process from offering exclusively products or services to selling solutions over the last years. Cross-functional integration is regarded as a key success factor for solution providers. Nevertheless, one of the most challenging (and potentially frustrating) aspects of modern life as a marketer can be the cooperation between marketing and other functions such as R&D or sales caused by differences between the departmental thought worlds. To break down these barriers, this research project empirically investigates various facets of thought-world differences and their effects on cross-functional integration. Furthermore, the research project assesses the impact of integrating the R&D, marketing, and sales functions across the four stages of the solution selling process on the solution orientation of a firm. For further information, please contact: Sabine Mark

Value selling. It is a common recommendation that successful salespeople emphasize the economic value of their offering in customer conversations. In this research project, we analyze value selling empirically. How can value selling be measured empirically? What are prerequisites? Is value selling really linked to beneficial performance outcomes, even if other types of salesperson behavior are controlled for? Using a sample of more than 200 B2B salespeople we seek answers to these questions. For further information please contact: Martin Klarmann or

Marc Wouters

Consumer ethnocentrism. Consumers showing ethnocentric tendencies contribute to barriers to international market entry. However, identifying these consumers remains difficult for firms. This research applies configurational theory to shed light on consumer ethnocentrism and its antecedents. The central methodological approach is fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA). For further information, please contact: Sven Feurer

Completed Projects:

Salesperson relationship in the digital network age. The analysis of customer-salesperson relationships has received much research attention in the past decade. However, we look at the salesperson’s perspective of such relationships. Two major topics are studied. (1) Does feeling committed to a specific customer as well as to the employer create divided loyalties? What are drivers and outcomes? (2) How can salespeople effectively use social media? Is it already an important tool for personal selling? What are future potentials? Further information can be found here

Pricing for prestige brands. The price of a product is both a sacrifice and an information indicator. Particularly, prestige brands use a premium pricing strategy to signal exclusivity, status, conspicuousness and quality to the customer. Despite the risk of damaging brand image, price promotions are used across all brand categories. This thesis studies the effects of price promotions on brand perception and purchase intention of prestigious brands. Specifically this thesis considers consumer heterogeneity with regard to their individual motivation for purchasing prestigious brands and their perception with regards to price. Further information can be found here

Drivers and outcomes of price complexity. Sellers often use complex price presentations to convey tariff information to consumers. In this research project we compare customer responses to complex prices between different service types: airlines, banking, electricity, health clubs, and mobile communication. We conduct a series of experimental studies to investigative the role of price complexity in tariff choice situations. Further Information can be found here