Symposium ‘Marketing Research meets Marketing Practice’ great success

The theme of the day focused on how emerging technologies and innovative strategies are transforming the marketing landscape. Presentations given by leading Erasmus School of Economics marketing professors covered topics such as new business models in platform markets, influencer marketing, the use of customer insights for innovation, and simulating market research data with Large Language Models (LLMs). These talks provide valuable insights for both academic and professional marketers.

New Business Models in Platform Markets

Michiel van Crombrugge, Assistant Professor at Erasmus School of Economics, talked about new business models in platform markets. Following the digitalisation of marketplaces and the subsequent dominance of powerful online platforms like Amazon or Google, many brands have developed their own platforms to regain control and direct access to their consumers. Sports brands such as Nike, for instance, launched product customisation platforms that allow personalised purchases. Software brands such as Microsoft launched subscription platforms that shift the focus from product ownership to product access. Van Crombrugge’s talk combined insights from his research on how this platformisation of brands and their new business models have disrupted the market structure of multi-firm marketplaces. Based on a value creation-value appropriation framework, van Crombrugge posits that branded platforms are a double-edged sword, given that the value that they create often forces all market players to contest for their piece of the pie.

Revenue Generation Through Influencer Marketing 

Assistant Professor Andreas Bayerl's research explores how firms can generate revenue efficiently through influencer marketing on Instagram, TikTok and the like. The study reveals that partnering with influencers who have smaller followings (so called nano- or micro influencer) results in a higher return on investment compared to those influencers with larger followings (so called macro- or mega influencer). Together with Steven Lammertink, CEO of The Cirqle, Bayerl discussed these findings, which provide valuable insights for businesses in selecting the most effective influencers for their marketing campaigns.

Customer Insights for Innovation

In Camacho’s research, which he conducted together with Professor Stefan Stremersch, he synthesised five decades of academic research, surveyed 305 innovation managers, and interviewed twelve executives from top market research agencies like Ipsos, Nielsen, Kantar, IQVIA, and GfK to help firms use customer insights for innovation. Next, they created a framework that offers guidance on how firms can effectively gather data, extract insights, and act on these insights when making innovation decisions. Their findings highlight that companies often underuse customer insights for innovation. This is especially true for customer insights domains that require active customer involvement, such as crowdsourcing and co-creation. They provide recommendations to help firms to benefit from customer insights and avoid missing innovation opportunities. Lastly, Camacho shortly discussed how AI can be used for costumer insights. In his presentation, Camacho was joined by Henrike Reinhardt, who is Senior Director Research Innovation at EMEA.

Simulating market research data using LLMs

The research of Martijn de Jong, co-authored with Bas Donkers, focuses on automated market research leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to simulate human responses in market research tasks. This methodology can efficiently generate insights on for instance brand perceptions, attitudes, and behaviour. The agreement rates with traditional human surveys vary from context to context, but by speeding up the research process and reducing costs, LLM-based approaches promise to enhance the scope of market research, making it possible to explore more detailed and varied questions without relying solely on human participants. De Jong’s presentation was followed by insights from Niels Schillewaert, Head of Research and Methodologies at Conveo.ai, who discussed how AI can be used to analyse in-depth interviews.

All in all, bringing together experienced practitioners and marketing scientists, this event fostered a unique exchange of knowledge and ideas between the worlds of research and real-world application.