Research Department of Marketing

Faculty members are internationally recognized as among the most productive individual researchers in the field.

Below, we describe what’s unique about our key areas of research, and we describe the types of activities we hold in order to support and encourage research.

Here are our most recent publications, recent grants and awards.

Key research areas

Our faculty include internationally-recognized scholars, some of whom sit on editorial boards of the major journals, in all three marketing subdomains: marketing strategy, consumer behavior, and marketing modelling.  We include a brief description of the key areas and describe what makes Tilburg unique.

Modeling

Marketing modeling uses a rigorous mathematical approach to improve the actions of managers and offer a deeper understanding of marketing phenomena (e.g., pricing, branding, advertising). In the age of Big Data, Tilburg supports high-powered cloud computing and data infrastructure through Surfsara,a collaborative organization for Dutch education and research. Another facility is CentERpanel (an internet based panel of 5000 households in The Netherlands).

Research portrait: Hannes Datta

Consumer behavior

Consumer behavior draws on psychology to study both micro-level processes  (e.g., brand choice) and macro-level issues (e.g., materialism). Tilburg has excellent facilities to conduct experimental behavioral economics and consumer behavior research, including the CentER-Lab.

The lab has multiple rooms including one with ten individual cubicles with computers in a network to conduct individual decision research. Four of the cubicles have an infra-red eyetracking system to monitor eye-movements during the experiments. In addition the CentER-lab has a group room with 20 computers to conduct negotiation and collaboration research in groups. The CentERpanel can be used at nominal charge by faculty members to conduct ad-hoc and longitudinal survey research and to do computer-based experiments. The panel is managed by a professional staff that takes care of the programming, data preparation and support of the research.

Research portrait: Niels van de Ven

Marketing strategy

Marketing strategy focuses on developing theories to understand firms and markets, with an emphasis on managerial and strategic issues (e.g., buyer-supplier relationships), and draws upon theories and methods from strategic management, organizational behavior, and industrial economics. Partnerships with organizations like AiMark and GfK, help ensure the collection of rich data with which to study these phenomena.

Research portrait: Marnik Dekimpe