Prof. Dr. Thorsten Hennig-Thurau holds the Chair for Marketing & Media Research at the University of Münster’s prestigious Marketing Center (MCM), acting as its spokesperson since 2019. He serves as the academic director of the university’s M.B.A. in Marketing program and of the MCM’s eXperimental Reality Lab (XRLab@MCM), which explores value creation in immersive settings and which he initiated in 2020. Prior to joining the University of Münster in 2010, he was a professor at the Bauhaus University of Weimar. From 2005 to 2014, he also served as a part-time Research Professor of Marketing at City University London’s Cass Business School. Professor Hennig-Thurau has been recognized as one of the leading German scholars in the field of business administration by various national and international rankings, including F.A.Z. and Handelsblatt. The "Stanford Study," published in the journal PLOS, identifies him as one of the top 100 most research-intensive marketing scientists globally. According to the AD Scientific Index, he is among the top 3% most cited scholars across all disciplines worldwide.

Professor Hennig-Thurau’s academic work focuses on the impact of digitalization on consumers and businesses; his work on how digitalization affects and challenges the practices and theory of the firm goes back to the introduction of the web browser in the mid-1990s. Since then, his scholarly contributions include the seminal work on electronic word of mouth, the “pinball framework” of digital marketing, and most recently the inaugural value-creation framework for the virtual-reality metaverse. Professor Hennig-Thurau is also an expert in the field of entertainment and media; in a 900-pages book, he and M.B. Houston coined the term “Entertainment Science” as a paradigm to successfully market entertainment products in the digital age by combining intuition with data analytics and practical theory (http://entertainment-science.com).

His research has been published several times by the world’s leading scholarly journals such as the Journal of Marketing (in which he had eight articles since 2006), the Academy of Management Journal, the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science and Journal of Applied Psychology. His work has been highly influential, as reflected by more than 36,000 citations according to Google scholar as of October 2023. His work has been covered frequently by leading international media outlets, including America’s New York Times and Businessweek, Britain’s Financial Times, as well as by most of Germany’s prestigious newspapers and magazines.

Professor Hennig-Thurau has been honored with numerous awards, including a Lifetime Award for Published Scholarly Contributions from the UCLA and the JAMS Sheth Foundation Best Paper Award in both 2015 and 2018. Professor Hennig-Thurau has been the president of marketing professors in Germany, the first European member of the Academic Council of the American Marketing Association, the director of the Digitalization Think:Lab (a joint initiative with Roland Berger Strategy Consultants at the forefront of the digital revolution), and was a founder of the highly impactful JOURQUAL ranking of academic journals (which he also co-edited for more than 15 years). He has received multiple research grants from the German Research Foundation (DFG) and other organizations and was a leading contributor to the DFG Research Unit “Social Media Marketing”, the first ever of its kind in the field of marketing and business research. He has (co-)chaired several high-profile events, including the AMA’s Winter Marketing Academic Conference in Las Vegas, the Big Data, Big Movies Conference in Berlin in 2016, and the 2018 Mallen Filmed Entertainment Economics Conference (http://themallenconference.org).