Back from EMAC 2017 conference : what’s hot in marketing research ?

Like every year I’ve attened the EMAC conference (this year in Groningen, The Netherlands) and can confirm it’s the right place to be if you want to keep up with the latest research in the marketing field (although this year the AMS conference took place at the same time and all marketing researchers had thus to make a choice between going to The Netherlands and going to California).

The EMAC confernce is also the right place to meet new scholars and strengthen bonds with new ones. I was for instance very impressed by the presentations given by Frank Beke (PhD student at Groningen University) on e-privacy, and the research by Bernd Skiera and Klaus Miller (both at the University of Frankfurt) on the Economic Consequences of Cookie Deletion (I’ll make sure to write seperate article on each one of these researches in the coming days).
Another highlight for me were the 2 talks by Roland Rust (University of Maryland) and the keynote by Michael Hänlein (whom I really love to listen to each time I’ve the opportunity to meet him in a conference). Roland Rust was given an award for his lifelong career in the field of marketing research (some 30000 citations !) and was invited to give a special 90-min session on the last day of the conference to present some of his papers from the last 20 years. His predictions on the market of privacy (published in 2002 under the title “the customer economics of internet privacy“) were amazingly right for instance.

The talk by Michael Hänlein was also very inspiring. Michael revisited Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and showed that practices in this field are outdated. Making the analogy with marriage (which is pretty much what CRM aim at doing : dating, engaging and getting married with customers) he showed that the lanscape of relationships with customers has changed dramatically in the last years. Yet practices don’t change and CRM managers keep following strategies that don’t take these changes into account.