Core Fields of Research
The research activities and related co-operations as well as consultancy projects of the Chair are pertaining six core areas:
1. Customer Management/ Key Account Management
Customer Management includes all business processes that are focused on the analysis, acquisition, retention and development of customers. The research of the Chair is dealing with issues of both customer rating and customer research such as customer satisfaction, customer retention, customer value or customer controlling, with questions of relationship marketing and its tools (customer clubs, cards, events etc.) as well as with the organizational implementation (process management, structural basis), particularly with the Key Account Management. Our European Network for Key Account Management (EN KAM) serves the purpose of bringing together the research in Key Account Management.
2. Sales- and Marketing Organization
The Chair also engages with the process-oriented perspective of the organization of Sales and Marketing. The management of Sales- and Marketing functions with the goal of realization of targeted Sales- and Marketing strategies is the center of attention.
3. Price Management / Price Policy
Within pricing research, the Chair is dealing with the pricing behavior on the customer side, and on the company side with issues of implementation of pricing policies. Currently, central issues are price organization and price controlling.
4. Digitization of Business Models and Processes
The Research Center for Business Models in the Digital World is a shared research entity of the University of Bamberg and the Fraunhofer-Institute for Integrated Circuits (IIS), where we research how the digitization affects the value creation activities and chain. Our specific interest focuses on the role of Sales and Marketing, e.g. in so-called "Asset light business models" (e.g. Uber or Air BnB), for which assets such as Brand and CRM-System are the main success factors.
5. Brand Management
Within the Brand Management, the Chair deals with both marketing as an instrument on sales markets (brand personality, brand identity, customer-brand-relationhips) and with the relevance of brands on other markets such as the labor market (employer branding) or financial markets.
6. Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and Marketing Ethics
Research in the field of CSR and Marketing Ethics is currently related to the design of marketing instruments as well as the social responsibility of marketing.