Research mission
The mission of the Marketing Research Group of UAntwerp can be summarized as ‘doing cutting-edge research on marketing and innovation with the ambition to be highly visible in international academic networks and highly relevant for practice, both in a business and a social-profit context’.
The group has an academic identity that is based on two main pillars: marketing communications and branding, and co-creation and innovation. Important values of the research group are: a focus on quality and valorisation of academic work, integration and cooperation, and managerial relevance. Members of the research group are encouraged to do academic work that is of high quality, is presented at high quality conferences, and published in international reference journals.
Professors and Ph.D. students are aware of each other’s work and support each other and cooperate on a regular basis. The professors of the group actively explore opportunities to cooperate in new research projects, bridging the two main research pillars of the group (for instance, marketing communications in co-creation processes). Research projects often have a managerial angle, and/or are conducted in cooperation with companies and organisations (for instance, media companies, pharmaceutical companies, government agencies).
Research topics
In recent years and currently, research has been conducted one the one hand in the area of consumer behaviour and marketing communication.
Specific research topics include:
- The impact of media context on advertising effectiveness
- Consumer behaviour with respect to fair trade products
- Optimal advertising strategies for different types of brand strategies and new product introductions
- The persuasive power of fear appeals in social profit campaigns
- Advertising on interactive digital television
- The impact of different persuasive strategies in health communication
- Customer loyalty modelling
On the other hand research has focussed on product/service innovation and distribution management. Specific research topics include:
- Services innovation, in particular the role of communication and organizational/marketing interfaces during the project-life cycle
- Organizational antecedents and impact of knowledge building/learning during service innovation within emerging digital markets
- Customer co-created knowledge : the impact & nature during the innovation process of high-tech services
- Online consumer behaviour, store environments & retailing : the impact of the store environment on affective, cognitive and conative consumer reactions
- Conceptual integration & development of a more generic classification of distribution service outputs.