The Chair of Marketing is focused on understanding the behavior of consumers in the marketplace and the rules of consumers’ decision-making. The goal of our empirical work is to generate innovative insights in our main research areas: Smart Products and Services, Design Thinking, Product Design, and the Marketing of Innovations. In our research, we follow an approach that aims to understand consumer behavior from a psychological perspective.

Furthermore, we place special emphasis on bringing the latest conceptual and methodological developments in marketing as well as our own research findings back into the classroom.

Focus research areas

• IoT, Smart Products and Smart Services: The growing interconnectivity and intelligence of technological products are increasingly blurring the boundaries between products and services and enable a radically new customer experience. These developments, in turn, raise a number of new questions for marketing and innovation research. In ongoing research projects, we examine, for example, different types of smart products and their implications for innovation management, consumers’ psychological and behavioral responses to smart products, and the use of AI-based service tools.
• Design Thinking: New technologies and accelerated innovation cycles increase the pressure on companies to innovate. Therefore, a systematic structuring of the innovation process is an essential part of innovation management. In this context, Design Thinking has gained in importance as a method for user-centred problem solving and idea generation. Within the scope of our research, we look at Design Thinking from various perspectives. At the macro level, we examine how Design Thinking can be linked to alternative innovation strategies to optimize the innovative capacity of companies. On the micro-level, we also analyze individual elements, tools, and phases from the Design Thinking process and modify them utilizing user involvement.
• Product Design and Product Aesthetics : Product design and product aesthetics can enable companies to generate a competitive advantage. In our research, we examine how product design and aesthetics affect consumers’ buying decisions. Specifically, we investigate how the appearance of a product affects its perceived functionality and also seek to understand how companies can communicate abstract brand values and functional innovations through the design of their products.
• Marketing of Innovations: Although many companies focus on technological innovations, many of these innovations do not find customer acceptance and ultimately fail in the market. Against this background, we investigate on the one hand how consumers react to technological innovations and how companies can systematically increase the acceptance and adoption of their innovations through appropriate marketing. On the other hand, we also investigate how technological innovations change consumer behavior and affect the process of value creation between companies and customers.

Industry cooperations

The Chair of Marketing maintains cooperations with well-known companies from different industries. The cooperation with the Ford RIC research center in Aachen is particularly noteworthy in this respect. In joint research projects, we focus – among other things – on the development of customer-centric innovations in the B2B sector using the latest innovation methods. The Chair of Marketing supports its industrial partner Ford in particular in the "Commercial Vehicle" sector, from idea generation to concept development. Here, we use established methods from empirical technology acceptance research. Through this intensive exchange, the Chair of Marketing has been able to build up extensive industry competence.