You are a professor of Marketing and Head of the Department of Marketing and the Institute for Marketing Management at Vienna University of Economics and business (WU Vienna). Can you tell us about your research?
– My primary areas of research are marketing, innovation, and consumer behavior. My ongoing research projects revolve around diverse topics such as creativity, groundedness, new product ideation, and sustainability. For example, how to boost one’s creative potential, how can marketers work with the concept of groundedness? How can AI complement crowdsourcing efforts for firms? and, how can we help consumers to live a more sustainable life? With regard to the latter, we have discovered that by making a certain behaviour merely more fun for the focal customer, you can increase their engagement in the target behaviour. The tenet that “sustainable behaviour should be fun” is thought provoking to popular lay and expert beliefs – and broad literature streams – according to which the underlying problem should be at the focus of attention, for example, we need to recycle to save the world. Instead, our idea is to focus on immediate self-benefits, which provides a disruptive alternative to spur behaviour that is good for the world. For example, in a field experiment we found that customers are actually more willing to offset a bus trip in case the offsetting option is embedded in a fun challenge.
As a visiting professor at CTF you participate in various research activities, what do you hope to contribute with?
– I hope I can help researchers at CTF to develop their research ideas into impactful papers. While I love to use multiple methods, including conducting qualitative interviews and analysing secondary data sets, my core method expertise lies in the area of experimentation, in the lab and field. I hope I can contribute that method expertise to the group. In addition, my experience as editor of a major marketing journal, the International Journal of Research in Marketing, may help me to provide constructive feedback on all kinds of marketing-related research at CTF. Of course, it would be cool to kick-off joint research projects as well.
The collaboration started in 2018 and has now been extended, what is your experience so far?
– I have had a great time getting to know the great scholars at CTF, and we have had many research seminars and discussions. For example, we have worked on improving the ideation process by relaxing the tiers between idea evaluation and selection, and we have discussed how the origin of food products, local versus nonlocal, affects food consumption and food waste production. As is the case with any ambitious innovation project, not all ideas worked. But we are hopeful that some of the ongoing ideas will eventually see the light of day. On my next visit, I will give a research seminar and will be meeting with different research groups, including PhD students. I’m looking forward to the interesting exchanges!
The visiting professorship is funded by Anne-Marie and Gustaf Ander Foundation for Media Research during 2024–2026.
Read Martin Schreier´s blog post:
