Our work at the Chair of Marketing Management is always guided by our overarching conceptual philosophy of Marketing Strategy and Customer Centricity. Those concepts being the core of our activities, we cover three adjacent main research areas: Sales Management, Channels & Retailing, and Customer Management.
 

Customer Management

Together with Brand Management, Customer Management is considered to be the most important driver of success in marketing and sales. Our research in this domain is covering aspects of new customer acquisition, customer retention, and win-back. Several papers by professor Krafft and his chair are heavily cited, influential, and considered as seminal work.

Recent projects deal with customer experience, loyalty programs, and interfaces of CRM with artificial intelligence and machine learning. In these studies, the chair collaborates with scholars from Europe, Canada, USA, and New Zealand.

Sales Management

Sales Management is a rather neglected field in marketing science, though it is the most important, revenue-generating function in many industries, in particular in the B2B sector. Professor Krafft and his team are considered as one of the leading research groups in sales in Europe. Actually, Manfred Krafft was the first non-US editor of the Journal of Personal Selling & Sales Management ever. Research on compensation, sales force control, sales teams, coordination of marketing and sales, or delegation of pricing authority has been published in leading journals.

Currently, sales research on direct selling, remote selling and value-creating sales is conducted in collaboration with researchers from Europe, North America, and New Zealand.

Channel Management & Retailing

Channel Management and Retailing deal with aspects of distribution and interaction between buyers, suppliers, and offline or online intermediaries. The Chair of Marketing Management has published influential and award-winning papers on routes to market, in-store mobile advertising, multi-level marketing, shopper marketing, and atmospherics in retailing.

Current research projects deal with digital business platforms, retailing of the future, and effects of radical transformations of stores on consumer attitudes and behavior. This research is conducted in collaboration with colleagues from Europe, India, and North America.