Marketing
We are particularly interested in consumer behaviour, customer engagement and retention strategies, service quality delivery, branding (including political branding and brand mapping), target market strategy and digital marketing.
The Department's staff routinely publish in these areas, chair conference tracks and manage special interest groups for the Academy of Marketing and other influential bodies. A strong theme is the bridging of theory and practice: we strive to both develop new concepts but ensure relevance and applicability to marketing professionals' needs. We ensure a strong synergy between our teaching and research activities, so that the latest research outputs inform our students' understanding of the subject.
Over the past few years, much greater emphasis has been placed on research at Oxford Brookes and in particular within the Faculty of Business. In the Marketing Department we now have three quarters of our faculty and several of our Associates routinely publishing in the foremost journals, presenting papers at the leading international conferences, providing keynote talks at high profile trade association and corporate events, reviewing for the principal conferences and journals, managing special interest groups, and collaborating on research bids. For example, eleven marketers from Brookes recently presented papers at the Academy of Marketing Conference in Liverpool.
We have a large and expanding body of postgraduate research students pursuing PhDs, plus a growing number of Doctoral Studentships who combine teaching duties with their PhD research. There are around twenty PhD students being supervised by marketers in the Department and four PhD Studentships.
We encourage colleagues to investigate research areas which interest them, support their teaching, and which foster strong links with corporates and researchers in other academic institutions. We have established many successful research and writing partnerships with academics and practitioners outside Oxford Brookes.
We are also conscious that our research should contribute to the big themes for our discipline. We are mindful of the stated research priorities from the Marketing Science Institute, which currently include:
Marketing Strategy That Anticipates and Responds to Changing Conditions
Successful firms must anticipate changing marketing conditions, be responsive to customer needs, and compete by offering superior value. To achieve these goals, marketers are required to provide decision-relevant information about which strategies will be effective under different future conditions. Consistent with this notion, research is required on these four priority topics:
- Using Market Information to Identify Opportunities for Profitable Growth
- Understanding Customer Experience and Behaviour
- Developing Marketing Capabilities for a Customer-focused Organization
- Identifying and Realizing Innovation Opportunities
Marketing Management and Practice in an Evolving Landscape
Successful firms must develop a coherent marketing plan that delivers value to customers and captures value for shareholders. To achieve these goals, marketers must manage an expanded and complex marketing mix - using increasingly sophisticated marketing tools and practices. Hence, research is required on these four priority topics:
- Delivering Value through Enhanced Media and Channels
- Managing Brands in a Transformed Marketplace
- Allocating Resources to Marketing Activities
- Leveraging Research Tools and New Sources of Data
A recent survey of senior marketers undertaken by our faculty identified - in addition to managing brands and marketing strategies through the recession - the following as current drivers in practice for marketing and marketing strategy:
- Brand strategy, specifically attribute deliverables, brand values and understanding the more subjective personality traits and emotion of brands;
- Smarter marcomms, with a raft of emerging direct and digital techniques to harness, plus the growing role of consumer-to-consumer communications facilitated by digital media;
- Innovation, in products, packaging, marcomms, channels, customer contact and strategizing processes, but reflecting customers' drivers and their changing circumstances, rather than organisational capabilities and companies' traditional behaviours in markets;
- Shrewder targeting, at various levels, including target market segments, CRM (customer-specific), competitor and the internal level;
- Managing implementation of marketing strategy, so as to effectively control who, what, where, when, how; with a cost-benefit assessment; utilising audits, reviews, remedial actions and incentives/rewards;
- Performance metrics, to ensure more balanced and convincing financial performance measures, customer-oriented performance criteria, and marketing shareholder value analysis.
While we encourage staff in the Marketing Department to explore their own research interests, we also wish to have alignment for much of our research activity with the accepted priorities for august bodies such as the Marketing Science Institute and with the views of leading practitioners. As such, current core research foci for the Department at present are:
1. Understanding and Managing Customers (consumers and organisational customers)
This theme includes colleagues' research into customer service, fairness in CRM, trust, marketing to gay consumers, consumer choice behaviour, customer satisfaction, consumer experience and studies into various aspects of consumption.
2. Marketing Strategy
This theme encompasses research examining brand strategy, brand positioning, channel strategies, segmentation and target marketing, and managing the implementation of marketing strategy. A particular interest is the bridging of theory and practice, to understand how best to guide practitioners.
3. Brand Strategy
Recent faculty recruitment has significantly enhanced the Department's interest into branding, brand strategy, brand mapping and aspects of brand equity, including in the fascinating arena of political brand strategy and political marketing.
4. Service Quality
A team of colleagues is involved in researching aspects of services marketing and service quality delivery.
5. Digital Marketing
While it is proving challenging for practitioners to harness the new world of digital marketing, communications and social media, a large number of the Department's staff is involved in ground-breaking research in this fast-evolving area.
Current research is embedded in most markets: consumer goods, business-to-business, services and retailing, as significant areas of interest. There is also much ongoing research into aspects of the 3rd Sector. A growing area of interest is in social marketing issues, such as e-borders/profiling, healthy eating and well-being.
Various Department staff chair or co-chair special interest groups for bodies such as the Academy of Marketing. Colleagues routinely review for all of the major conferences, journals and publishers and two are Associate Editors for the Journal of Marketing Management. One of the Department's Professors is a trustee of charity Alcohol Research UK, which funds social marketing research, and another is a member of the Academy of Marketing's Research Committee, which over-sees policy for the Academy. We are linked strongly to most of the principal professional bodies, acting as their advisers, mentors, referees and reviewers for their academic development and research strategies.
The Department has enjoyed significant growth in the past 18 months, recruiting staff from established research centres in various well-known business schools, as we build an enviable research capability within Marketing. The Department now has four Professors and a Reader guiding research in the domain of Marketing. We will have a very compelling submission to the next research assessment exercise (the REF) and most of our staff have strong portfolios of research outputs, addressing highly topical and challenges aspects of marketing and marketing strategy.
For further insights, please contact the Department's Research Area Leader, Professor Lyndon Simkin.
Prof Lyndon Simkin
Professor of Marketing and Operations Management
and Research Area Leader
Principal research interests/personal research themes
Market Segmentation and Target Market Strategy: the processes required to create and execute.
The Marketing Planning Toolkit: how to embed appropriate processes in organisations.
B2B Go-to-Market Strategies and Proposition Development: creation and execution.
Implementation Management: managing blockers to operationalising strategies.
Specific examples of research interests
For many years, this research has endeavoured to understand how organisations develop, execute and often fail to fully benefit from new business strategies, segmentations, brand strategies, target market strategies, etc.
From the insights gleaned, there are four linked areas of interest and associated bodies of research outputs:
- Strategizing to bring about market-oriented change but manageable by the organisation
- Re-thinking target market priorities and value propositions
- Creating processes, behaviours and cultures amongst leadership teams to foster the above
- Identification and remedying of the inevitable impediments to strategizing and execution
Bjoern Asmussen
Senior Lecturer
Principal research interests/personal research themes
What is a (corporate) brand?
How do you define/conceptualise it? Issues of defining the term/concept? How do people (e.g. brand managers, non-marketing employees and other stakeholders) define/conceptualise it? What are the issues in brand discourse that result from a lack of definitions/concepts or too many different ones without any agreement?
How do you manage a (corporate) brand?
What is (corporate) brand management? How do you do it? Processes? Relevance of (brand) stakeholders and tangible/intangible resources? How does the emergence of the internet impact on (corporate) brand management/managers?
Specific examples of research interests
For many years, this research has endeavoured to understand how organisations develop, execute and often fail to fully benefit from new business strategies, segmentations, brand strategies, target market strategies, etc.
From the insights gleaned, there are four linked areas of interest and associated bodies of research outputs:
- How do (corporate) brand managers make sense of brands and brand management?
- The use of brand metaphors - a gestalt-sociological approach
- What is a brand from a social constructivist perspective?
- The internet-based democratisation of brand management - an exploration of managerial perspectives
Dr Ana Domingos Canhoto
Senior Lecturer
Principal research interests/personal research themes
- Segmentation
Particularly a) how to overcome information asymmetries and b) identifying implementation barriers. - Customer Relationship Management
Identifying and managing undesirable customers.
Specific examples of research interests
- Identifying good proxies and alternative data sources (e.g. social media) to overcome situations where important information is not observable by the firm or is deliberately hidden by the customer - e.g. illegitimate activity, intention to defraud.
- Barriers that undermine the success of segmentation solutions, including technical (e.g. legacy systems), organisational (e.g. culture) and cognitive factors (e.g. stereotypes).
- Developing effective customer screening to avoid recruiting undesirable customers (i.e. that have negative value for the firm), as well as issues around customer demotion and relationship termination.
Dr Steve Chen
Senior Lecturer
Principal research interests/personal research themes
- Marketing: eMarketing
To establish a trust relationship channel in the virtual marketplace. - Consumer Behaviour: Luxury Consumption
To understand how consumers perceive luxury brand and products in different countries. - IT Capability Study: CRM
To investigate how IT was utilised in different sectors for better CRM performance.
Specific examples of research interests
- eBay (Online Auction): critical components vs. auction outcome, i.e. Trust, Price, Rating, Time, etc.
- Luxury consumption in Taiwan, Japan, Hong-Kong, UK, etc. How consumers perceive differently lux brands, decision-making processes, etc.
- IT related study: how organisations can perform better with IT supported CRM.
Dr Jackie Clarke
Reader
Principal research interests/personal research themes
Services Marketing
Often explored through the lens of tourism and leisure; emerging interests in the application of service dominant logic and co-creation to the service sector; sustainability and the services marketing interface.
Consumer Behaviour
Focus on service sector, often using tourism and leisure as the vehicle; qualitative, interpretive research; emerging interests in service dominant logic and co-creation insights for consumer behaviour.
Specific examples of research interests
- Consumption behaviour and decision processes of consumers using experiences (intangible products) as gifts within personal relationships; also experiential marketing context
- Theory building around how consumers use 'portfolios' of tourism products, rather than the traditional treatment of vacations as stand-alone episodes
- Group consumer behaviour in mixed dwellings or 'half-households'; consumers as resource integrators (bid to British Academy Small Grants Scheme: outcome not yet known)
Prof Yuksel Ekinci
Professor
Principal research interests/personal research themes
Consumer-Based Brand Equity/Brand Personality/Destination Personality/Services Branding/Self-Concepts/Symbolic Consumption of Brands - The branding research includes applications of the branding theories in the services industry and across different cultures.
Consumer Loyalty/Consumer Satisfaction/Service Quality/Consumer Emotions/Consumer Experience/Consumer Relationship Management (CRM) - The consumer loyalty theme includes measurement of CS, SQ and users' evaluation of the CRM technology in the services industry.
Marketing Research - Marketing research theme includes quantitative analysis of the consumer data, developing measurement scales, validation of the measurement scales and consumer insight analysis
Specific examples of research interests
- Measurements of customer satisfaction, service quality, consumer loyalty, consumer-based brand equity in hotels, call centres, Universities, etc.
- Analysis of the user's evaluations of the CRM systems, consumer data in private and public sector companies including, data base companies, consultancy companies, telecommunication companies, etc.
Tom Farrell
Senior Lecturer
Principal research interests/personal research themes
- Digital Marketing Communications, Advertising and Social Media
- Critical Social Marketing, Ethics & Corporate Social Responsibility
- Marketing and Society
- Future Marketing
Specific examples of research interests
- Upstream Practitioner Behaviour Change A Corrective Lens
- Assessing the impact of Alcohol Marketing in developing nations
- Ethical Decision Making and the Regulation of Controversial Advertising in The UK
- The future of Regulation in the Digital Age - 'Binge Britannia- Britannia Waives the Rules'
- Complaint Management Theory and Practice in the UK
- The 'Darkside of Alcohol Tourism'
- Alcohol Labelling the correct measure testing consumers understanding of safe limits
Dan Ganly
Programme Lead
Principal research interests/personal research themes
- Retail Marketing
- Management Development/Coaching and Mentoring
Specific examples of research interests
- Retail store location and design - Project management of opening large retail formats
- Retail store design Historical development of the "Megastore" concept and evolution of department stores
- Conceptions of coaching from a "coachee" perspective MBA students/Professional identity of executive coaches
William George
PhD Studentship
Principal research interests/personal research themes
- Consumer Behaviour
- Consumer Emotions
- Technology in Service Delivery
- Co-Creation of Value in Service Provision
- Experiments in Research Design
- Focusing on the consumer experience, especially in technology based interactions
- The role of technology in service delivery and how this influences co-creation of value
- Consumer psychology: using affective, cognitive and behavioural psychological approaches to improve understanding of consumer behaviour
Specific examples of research interests
- The influence of consumer emotions on self-service technology adoption
- How emotions, and other psychological constructs, can be used to enrich the study of consumer behaviour in marketing research
Faten Jaber
PhD Studentship
Principal research interests/personal research themes
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Relationship Marketing
Main areas of research lie in customer relationship marketing and technological innovation in marketing currently researching methods to improve CRM implementation and operation.
Specific examples of research interests
Currently focusing on a PhD titled 'Organisations' Adoption of e-CRM'. In this, the focus is on developing a comprehensive understanding of CRM systems, and what makes for their success or failure, by investigating factors that affect its adoption across different industries... the emphasis is within-the-firm take-up of CRM.
Nicolette Michels
Senior Lecturer
Principal research interests/personal research themes
University Knowledge Transfer
Critical investigation of the nature, perceptions, benefits, facilitators and barriers of university knowledge transfer. Development of conceptual and empirically-based implications for policy at national and institutional level (including impact assessment, strategic decision-making, operational structures, marketing, communications, rewards).
Enterprise and Entrepreneurial Management
Inter-disciplinary investigation of the nature of mechanisms supporting enterprise and embedding of sustainable entrepreneurial management (including development, impact and implications of funded programmes, consultancy, coaching).
Specific examples of research interests
- Valid knowledge in UK third stream development of a conceptual approach to analysing issues in the third stream; critique of national policy discourse; analysis of conceptions of partners involved in knowledge transfer initiatives.
- Embedding sustainable entrepreneurial management analysis of the impact of a government-funded pilot programme to embed enterprise; the value of change management theories for the UK enterprise in education agenda.
Dr Bang Nguyen
Senior Lecturer
Principal research interests/personal research themes
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Buyer-seller relationships, consumer behaviour, (un)fairness perceptions, trust, relationship symmetry, customisation/personalisation of offerings (target marketing), likeability effect, marketing futures, retailing.
Interests are mainly focused on building and enhancing relationships with customers in consumer markets. Often using examples from the internet (e.g. social media and e-tailers) as the internet and its technologies have enabled customisation of offerings on a one-to-one basis to flourish a key trait of CRM.
Specific examples of research interests
- Effects of customer relationship management offerings on the advantaged and disadvantaged customers
- The dark side of CRM (pitfalls and downsides of CRM implementation)
- Marketing futures
Dr Nicoletta Occhiocupo
Senior Lecturer
Principal research interests/personal research themes
- Services Marketing: Service Dominant Logic and Value Co-creation
- International Marketing and Retailing
- Branding
- Additional research interests 'would like/be happy to work on':
- Co-creation of value in healthcare (or pharma): comparative study UK, Italy and Spain
- Co-branding in retail with food products protected by denomination across countries (e.g. the impact of legislation on own branding/power shift manuf. retailers)
- The antitrust/compet. commission authorities' role in the market regulation across countries (e.g. with focus on retailing and/or advert)
- CRM across countries (e.g. Nectar in the UK and Italy)
- Corporate Social Responsibility in Retailing
Specific examples of research interests
- 'The value co-creating process: lessons learned from the case of a world leading manufacturer'.
- 'Innovation in Foodservice: the case of a leading Italian manufacturer'.
- 'Simulated Test Marketing in FMCG: some empirical evidence from the Russian market'.
- Work with PhD supervisees: democratisation of corporate branding and symbolic consumption of global brands.
Jacqui O'Rourke
Senior Lecturer
Principal research interests/personal research themes
Public-Private Partnerships
Building on relationship marketing principles to look at relationship quality/strength, in order to develop a framework to evaluate partnerships. This could help public sector organisations in choosing new partners.
Particularly interested in relational capital and whether it is possible to measure it. In the longer term, this would lead to examining the impact on end users of public services. Does a high quality relationship improve service delivery?
Specific examples of research interests
Just presented a paper at IRSPM which sought to identify the components of relational capital and measures for them. The framework developed was then tested on two public-private partnerships. This paper forms the basis of a PhD now starting to unfold.
Tracy Panther
Associate Dean Student Experience
Principal research interests/personal research themes
- Customer Satisfaction/Dissatisfaction and Loyalty
- Buyer Behaviour... in the context of services
Specific examples of research interests
- Responses to consumer dissatisfaction in the context of services, including switching behaviour, complaining behaviour and loyalty
- Loyalty to service providers
- Student (dis)satisfaction antecedents and responses
Sandra Preciado
Post-Doctoral Research Assistant
Principal research interests/personal research themes
- Branding and global brands
- Symbolic consumption
- Self-concept and identity
- Cultural and cross-cultural research
- Globalization
- Latin-America
- Fashion
- Qualitative and quantitative approaches
Main research interest is about consumers. Backgrounds in Psychology and Economic Psychology have developed an interest to understand consumer's behaviour and how this is linked to other psychological processes.
However, PhD research has discovered the importance of socio-cultural contexts in explaining these behaviours. Consumer's do not exist in isolation, but psychological and socio-cultural processes influence each other.
In marketing it is important to develop a more holistic understanding of consumers and their behaviours.
Globalization has created interesting tensions between the local and the global that need to be studied.
It is also relevant to explore marketing topics and consumer behaviour in different contexts outside the predominant views of the European and North American contexts.
Specific examples of research interests
- Symbolic consumption of global brands in Colombia and the UK
- Consumer's perception of global brands in the UK
- Consumer's meanings about global and local brands
- Symbolic consumption of tourist destination brand
Sarah Quinton
Senior Lecturer
Principal research interests/personal research themes
Digital Marketing, Branding and SME Development
- How and why technology is and can be used by SMEs to develop their brand in the competitive environment
- This incorporates the different types of new media (social and mobile for example) and covers both B2C and B2B SMEs
- The concept of value is important within this research: value for whom and the different constructs of both soft and hard value
- The conceptualisation of what brand development means to SMEs is also relevant
Specific examples of research interests
- The strategic rather than tactical use of online marketing
- Generating website traffic for SMEs
- Social networks and relationship marketing
- The identification of value creation by Twitter
Georgina Whyatt
Head of Department of Marketing
Principal research interests/personal research themes
Internal Marketing and Relationship Marketing
- Current personal research interest is based around understanding the variables that impact on successful internal marketing and the forces impacting on the execution of marketing strategies within the organisation (PhD studies)
- Published in the areas of Brand Loyalty, Relationship Marketing, and Town/City Management
Specific examples of research interests
- Participating in a book project with Sophie Reboud in BSB/Dijon and other academic colleagues from Canada and Australia about the Co-operative Business Model. Interest in this project is the marketing of cooperative values and principles
- Participating in a group bid for a $20,000 Canadian (first stage) and $2.5 million (2nd stage) partnership grant from The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada to develop co-operative research partnership as a Community of Learning and build an International Centre for Co-operative Management
- Currently conceptualising the internal marketing (in the broadest sense) forces supporting/hindering the execution of marketing strategy within higher education
Lindsay Williams
Principal Lecturer
Principal research interests/personal research themes
Advertising and the Gay Consumer
- Advertising approaches to attract the gay consumer (focusing on print and television advertisements)
- Specifically interested in the levels of implicit/explicit gay imagery and representation used in advertisements placed in both mainstream and gay media
- From a marcomms perspective but also in the contexts of cultures and consumer behaviour
Specific examples of research interests
- The deconstruction of advertisements and interpretation of meaning from a consumer/audience perspective (using visual methodologies)
- Exploring the cultural implications of advertising images and representation levels - magnifying the issues involved via a critical theory lens (thereby extending discussion beyond the dominant functionalist perspective)
