The German Research Foundation DFG has extended its substantial funding of the research group "How Social Media Changes Marketing" for three more years. It consists of renowned scholars from the University of Hamburg (Henrik Sattler, Michel Clement, and Mark Heitmann), the University of Cologne (Fanziska Völckner and Detlef Schoder), and the Kühne Logistics University (Sönke Albers and Christian Barrot), in addition to Münster’s marketing experts Professor Thorsten Hennig-Thurau and Dr. Ann-Kristin Kupfer.

After studying the phenomenon of nasty social media firestorms and their impacts on consumers and firms in the first funding period, the Münster scholars, together with their coauthors and doctoral students, will now shift their focus to something more positive: the pre-release buzz that many products experience (and benefit from) these days. Additional topics covered by the research group will include automatic image analysis, gamification, and the usage of trend information, among others.

We are excited for the new research projects to begin and the cooperation in this great team of scholars to continue. Stay tuned!

More information on this research group you can find here or on Facebook.