The chair’s core areas of work are:

• Sales and Customer Management (e.g., key account management, relationship marketing, customer satisfaction and loyalty, sales management, governance structures)

• Digitalization of Business Models and Processes (e.g., digital CRM, the role of social networks, smart glasses and applications)

• Marketing Organization (e.g., delineation between marketing and sales, development of new marketing units, process organization in marketing and sales)

• Pricing Management (e.g., questions of the organizational implementation of pricing, consumers’ price behavior, pricing strategy)

• Sustainability and Corporate Social Responsibility (e.g., collaborative sustainability management, open sustainability, food waste management, ethical issues in the use of marketing instruments)

In addition, research is conducted in the following areas, among others:

• Brand Management (e.g., brand personality studies, employer branding, branding and ethics)

• International Sales and International Marketing

The primary focus is on business-to-business markets and industrial firms.

For collaboration with companies within project frameworks, various options are available—from master’s theses and research or seminar projects to doctoral dissertations. For inquiries, please contact bjoern.ivens(at)uni-bamberg.de.

Björn Ivens studied Business Administration at the Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg and Political Science at the Université Robert Schuman in Strasbourg (France).

Before assuming the Chair of Marketing at the Otto-Friedrich University of Bamberg, he held a full professorship in Marketing at the Faculty of Business and Economics of the University of Lausanne (Switzerland).

He has long-standing research collaborations with colleagues at, among others, EM Lyon Business School (France), Queen Mary University of London (UK), and TU Bergakademie Freiberg (Germany).

As a visiting professor, he has taught and continues to teach at several German, French, British, and Swiss universities and business schools. Most recently, he spent a five-month research stay at Queen Mary University of London and a four-month research stay at the Université de Toulon.

His teaching experience covers both Bachelor’s and Master’s levels, as well as courses within doctoral schools and international MBA or Executive MBA programs.

He is a senior member of the Competence Center for Business Models in the Digital World, a joint research initiative of the Otto-Friedrich University and the Fraunhofer Society.

Collaborative, consulting, and seminar projects with various medium-sized and larger companies serve to facilitate practical knowledge transfer and exchange of experience.

His engagement in academic self-governance has included roles such as representing FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg in the Franco-German University, serving as co-director of the Executive MBA program of the University of Lausanne and EPFL, and acting as vice-dean of the Faculty of Business and Economics in Lausanne.

Currently, Björn Ivens serves, among other roles, as spokesperson of the Graduate School BaGSB of the Otto-Friedrich University Bamberg and as a member of the Sustainability Working Group of the university’s Chancellor. He supervises several internal and external doctoral projects and regularly serves as an external reviewer for doctoral and habilitation procedures at international universities, most recently at the Universities of Tilburg (Netherlands), St. Gallen (Switzerland), and Manchester (UK).

He is a member of the Editorial Boards of the journals Industrial Marketing Management and Review of Managerial Science and acts as an ad-hoc reviewer for numerous other international and national journals.

Professor Ivens has repeatedly been listed among the top 10% of the most productive business administration professors in Germany in the Handelsblatt research ranking for his research and publication achievements.

The goal of the chair is to regularly publish research findings in peer-reviewed academic journals while also ensuring knowledge transfer to business practice through contributions to journals and books that make the results of academic research accessible to a broader professional audience.

Leading international journals in which Björn Ivens’s work(448.4 KB) has recently appeared include:

• Academy of Marketing Science Review
• Journal of Business Research
• Psychology & Marketing
• Industrial Marketing Management
• Journal of Marketing Theory & Practice
• PLOS ONE
• Computers in Human Behavior
• International Journal of Electronic Commerce
• European Journal of Marketing
• Journal of Marketing Management
• Marketing Theory
• Review of Managerial Science
• Journal of Business & Industrial Marketing
• The IMP Journal
• Journal of Marketing for Higher Education
• Die Betriebswirtschaft
• Zeitschrift für Betriebswirtschaft
• Marketing ZFP
• Recherche et Applications en Marketing
• Revue Francaise de Gestion

A complete overview of Professor Ivens’s publications can be found in the current publication(448.4 KB) list.

An additional overview of his publications is available on Google Scholar.