I hold the Chair for Marketing & Media Research at the University of Münster’s prestigious Marketing Center (MCM), acting as the MCM's spokesperson since 2019. I also serve as the academic director of the university’s M.B.A. in Marketing program and of the MCM’s eXperimental Reality Lab (XRLab@MCM), which explores value creation in immersive settings and which I initiated in 2020 (with Björn Ognibeni). Prior to joining the University of Münster in 2010, I was a professor at the Bauhaus University of Weimar. From 2005 to 2014, I also served as a part-time Research Professor of Marketing at City University London’s Cass Business School (now Bayes Business School). I have been recognized as one of the leading German scholars in the field of business administration by various national and international rankings, including those by Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and Handelsblatt. The "Stanford Study," published in the journal PLOS, has ranked me as the 52nd most influential marketing scientist globally (2024).

My academic work mainly focuses on the impact of digitalization on consumers and businesses; my research on how digitalization affects and challenges the practices and theory of the firm goes back to the introduction of the web browser in the mid-1990s (which also gives you an idea how old I am... ;-). Since then, my scholarly contributions include the seminal work on electronic word of mouth (with more than 11,000 citations, one of my papers on ‘EWOM’ ranks among the most cited in the field), the “pinball framework” of digital marketing, and lately the inaugural value-creation framework for the virtual-reality metaverse. I also research the business of entertainment and media quite intensively; in our 900+ pages book, Mark B. Houston and I coined the term “Entertainment Science” as a paradigm to successfully market entertainment products in the digital age by combining intuition with data analytics and practical theory.

My research has been published several times by the world’s leading scholarly journals such as the Journal of Marketing (in which I published eight articles since 2006), the Academy of Management Journal, the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science and Journal of Applied Psychology. My work has been cited more than 40,000 citations in total (Google scholar, as of March 2025) and has been covered frequently by leading international media outlets, including America’s New York Times and Businessweek, Britain’s Financial Times, as well as by most of Germany’s prestigious newspapers and magazines.

My academic contributions have been honored with numerous awards, including a Lifetime Award for Published Scholarly Contributions from the UCLA and the JAMS Sheth Foundation Best Paper Award in 2015, 2018, and also in 2023. I was the president of marketing professors in Germany, the first European member of the Academic Council of the American Marketing Association, the director of the Digitalization Think:Lab (a joint initiative with Roland Berger Strategy Consultants at the forefront of the digital revolution), and the initiator and co-founder of the highly impactful JOURQUAL ranking of academic journals (which I then also co-edited for more than 15 years). I have received multiple research grants from the German Research Foundation (DFG) and other organizations and was a leading contributor to the DFG Research Unit “Social Media Marketing”, the first ever of its kind solely situated in the field of marketing and business research. I had the pleasure to (co-)chair a number of high-profile events, including the American Marketing Association’s Winter Marketing Academic Conference in Las Vegas, the Big Data, Big Movies Conference in Berlin in 2016, and the 2018 Mallen Filmed Entertainment Economics Conference.