The Chair of Marketing Management had the pleasure to welcome Dr. Niklas Teichmann as the second guest speaker in this year's Market Research class. Dr. Niklas Teichmann is the Director Analytics and Data Science at L'Oréal. In his guest lecture, which was held via Zoom, he highlighted the power behind data, which perfectly illustrated the practical relevance of the methods taught in class.

Before joining the world's biggest cosmetics player, Dr. Teichmann completed his doctorate in theoretical physics and held positions in companies such as McKinsey and OBI. Moreover, Dr. Niklas Teichmann shares his profound knowledge in data analytics in his position as lecturer at Hochschule Düsseldorf.

Building on his enthusiasm for data science, Dr. Teichmann explained the importance of data-driven problem solutions using the example of a customer care project at L'Oréal. The task of the customer care department is to assign questions submitted by customers to L'Oréal's product categories, such as hair care or make-up. Previously, the employees had to read each individual message and manually assign it to the respective category. This procedure was not only error-prone but also very time-consuming. With the implementation of Dr. Teichmann's machine learning project, he and his team trained algorithms on correctly classifying the messages into the respective categories. This new data-science approach will make the entire process way more precise and efficient.

During the subsequent Q&A session, Dr. Teichmann further emphasized the need to integrate data-driven subjects into the curricula of German universities. This topic is also close to the desire of the MCM to constantly expand its offer for students to learn data-driven methods in already existing classes and new specific courses.

The Chair of Marketing Management thanks Dr. Niklas Teichmann for investing time and effort in the guest lecture and hopes to welcome him again in person soon.