Development and self-concept

Professor Dr. Winfried Steiner has led the Department of Marketing since October 2007. The tasks and goals of the department are research in the field of marketing, sustainable knowledge transfer through interdisciplinary research cooperations and cooperations with business partners as well as the design of a scientifically sound and application-oriented teaching.

Positioning in research

The research focus of the Department of Marketing lies in the field of empirical-quantitative marketing. Central research topics deal with

• the optimal design of new products and product lines,
• the simulation of market introduction strategies for new products on the basis of game-theoretic equilibrium concepts,
• Choice-Based Conjoint Analysis as a method for preference measurement and market simulation,
• the econometric estimation of sales response functions/price sales functions, in particular using hierarchical Bayesian and non-parametric modelling approaches,
• the optimization of prices for products or whole product categories in retail assortments,
• brand choice modelling based on household panel data.

In particular, the rapidly increasing and amount of marketing-relevant data in business practice and its availability has for a long time led to an increased need for suitable methods for data analysis and optimization. Therefore, the department is also strongly interested in interdisciplinary research. Corresponding research cooperations currently exist with

• Prof. Dr. Harry Haupt Chair of Statistics and Data Analytics at the University of Passau,
• Prof. Dr. Thomas Kneib Professor of Statistics at the Georg-August University of Göttingen,
• Peter Kurz Managing Partner Innovation & Methods at bms marketing research & strategy in Munich (from 2001 to 2018 Head of Research and Development at Kantar TNS Munich),
• Prof. Dr. Stefan Lang Institute for Statistics at the Leopold-Franzens-University Innsbruck.

Positioning in teaching

In teaching, the department focuses on theoretically sound knowledge for solving practical marketing problems. Another focus is the implementation of marketing strategies and marketing decisions by means of suitable software or simulation programs in order to train the students in regard to the implementation of theory for the solution of real marketing problems. In addition to seminars and the basic modules Marketing and Market Research as well as Introduction to Business Administration in the Bachelor's program, specialization modules are offered as elective courses in the areas of buyer behavior, sales promotion and marketing decisions (product, price, communication and distribution policy).