• Marketing as Value Creation through Customer Centricity

  The powers of marketing as a leadership concept with the customers and their needs, wishes, and desires at its core is what drives our research at the Chair for Marketing & Media alias LMM. We see marketing as a company-wide concept that offers management, and society, unique ways to address those customer needs – i.e., to be successful by being customer centric. We are convinced that marketing can be hugely impactful, but are also aware of the psychological, but also societal responsibilities that come with such impact.

  Exemplary reference: Hennig-Thurau, T. (2013): Die Krise des Marketings. Harvard Business manager, June, p. 93-97.

   

  Against this background, we focus on the role of media for creating value for customer. We do so by applying two distinct, but related perspectives: an industry perspective and a tech perspective.

• Marketing of Entertainment and Media Products

  Marketing is widely associated with consumer products such as cars and packaged goods (e.g., foods, beverages, cosmetics), and sometimes with service and B2B offerings. But marketing is much less often associated with the media industry and its products – news via linear and non-linear channels, but also fiction content which provides the foundation for global blockbusters which let us escape our daily routines, but that can also inspire us and even can help us make sense of the world. At the LMM, we study the economics of entertainment and media, aiming to decypher why some movies, albums, and games become billion-dollar ventures, while other remain unknown to most people.

  We have developed a new paradigm to explain entertainment success which we call “Entertainment Science”. Entertainment science builds on the assumption that in the era of almost unlimited data and computer power, intuition remains important for success in the entertainment industries, but that the combination of smart analytics and powerful theories can provide equally valuable insights to those who have room for them in their decisions making. It combines insights that have been generated when scholars apply rigorous analytical methods to big data sets on the performance of movies, games, books, or music with powerful theories. Hence, entertainment science offers a systematic investigation of the knowledge that has been accumulated by scholars in various fields such as marketing and economics regarding the factors that make entertainment products successful – or let them flop.

  Exemplary references: Hennig-Thurau, T., & Houston, M. B. (2019). Entertainment Science: Data Analytics and Practical Theory for Movies, Games, Books, and Music. Springer Nature.

  Hennig-Thurau, T., Ravid, S. A., & Sorenson, O. (2021). The Economics of Filmed Entertainment in the Digital Era. Journal of Cultural Economics, 45, 157–170.

  Hennig-Thurau, T., Houston, M., & Heitjans, T. (2009). Conceptualizing and Measuring the Monetary Value of Brand Extensions: The Case of Motion Pictures. Journal of Marketing (J Mark), 73 (6), 167–183.

  Hennig-Thurau, T. & Henning, V. (2009): Guru Talk: Die deutsche Filmindustrie im 21. Jahrhundert. Verlag Schüren. Dieses Buch können Sie kostenlos hier herunterladen.

• Marketing With Digital and Virtual Technology

  Digitalization has fundamentally changed marketing. At the LMM, we have accompanied, and to a certain degree also shaped, this massive and far-reaching transformative process. As such, we have been studying (and continue to do so) changes in consumer behavior that result from the rising role of digital media and technology in our lives, and also how these changes affect marketing’s effectiveness. Our Chair has made major contributions to the understanding of consumer-generated content by introducing, and further exploring, the concept of electronic word of mouth. The seminal article ranks among the 50 most influential ones published in marketing journals.

  Additional digital marketing & communication phenomena include social media, which we have began to study as early as 2010, when we introduced the “pinball metaphor” of digital marketing, which we argue should retire the tradition view of marketing as a bowling game, as chaos has replaced linearity in the digital era. In 2013 we edited, and contributed to, an influential special issue in the Journal of Interactive Marketing dedicated to social media & marketing. Mirroring social media’s ongoing impact, we have continued our research journey of the medium and its impact on consumers. Most recently, we have broadened our perspective by addressing also social media’s effects on consumers’ well-being, showing that more social media engagement can heighten feelings of loneliness. We have been a proud part of a multi-university DFG Research Group that has explored “How Social Media is Changing Marketing” for more than six years.

  One of the most far-reaching changes in digital marketing has been the adding of a third dimension to digital media, made possible with new standalone hardware by firms such as Meta and Apple. In the age of the ‘metaverse’, spatial digital environments provide consumers with unprecedented experiences and companies with extensive challenges regarding the use of such environments. The Chair for Marketing & Media has been a driving force behind the founding of the eXperimental Reality Lab at the MCM; an institution which now ranks among the global leaders in research on extended realities. Our article on social interactions in virtual worlds in the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science has not only become one of the most-accessed ones, but has also been awarded with the journal’s highest prize. Today, most of the LMM team are studying such 3D spatial worlds, aiming to push the borders of knowledge when it comes to the ‘metaverse’ and everything XR, often using extensive experimental designs.

  Exemplary references: Hennig-Thurau, T., Aliman, D. N., Herting, A. M., Cziehso, G. P., Linder, M., & Kübler, R. V. (2023). Social interactions in the metaverse: Framework, initial evidence, and research roadmap. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 51(6), 889–913.

  Kupfer, A.-K., Pähler vor der Holte, N., Kübler, R. V., & Hennig-Thurau, T. (2018). The Role of the Partner Brand's Social Media Power in Brand Alliances. Journal of Marketing (J Mark), 82 (3), 25-44.

  Hennig-Thurau, T., Malthouse, E., Friege, C., Gensler, S., Lobschat, L., Rangaswamy, A., & Skiera, B. (2010). The Impact of New Media on Customer Relationships. Journal of Service Research, 13(3), 311–330.

  Hennig-Thurau, T., Gwinner, K. P., Walsh, G., & Gremler, D. D. (2004). Electronic Word-of-Mouth via Consumer-Opinon Platforms: What Motivates Consumers to Articulate Themselves on the Internet? Journal of Interactive Marketing, 18 (1), 38–52.

 In all these fields which we consider the main areas in which we conduct scholarly research, we study core marketing tools and instruments, such as branding and communications, innovation, and distribution, among others.