Speaker:    Dr. Sonja Gensler

Abstract:   Today, marketing managers face the challenge to allocate their budget across a plethora of marketing channels to build their brands and generate revenue. Allocating marketing budgets requires a solid knowledge about the different channel’s effectiveness. Moreover, a good understanding of how campaigns should be executed in the different channels is critical.
Literature that compares the effectiveness of multiple marketing channels is scarce, and the findings are mixed. We contribute to the literature by examining the relative effectiveness of traditional advertising, a firm’s activities on Facebook, consumer‐to‐consumer (C2C) messages on Twitter and
web forums for brand‐building and customer acquisition efforts. We use a vector autoregressive model to a unique data set from a European telecom firm. This modeling approach allows to consider the interrelations among traditional advertising, Facebook, and C2C messages. The results show that
traditional advertising is most effective for both brand building and customer acquisition. A firm’s Facebook activities complement traditional advertising efforts. Thus, thoroughly orchestrating traditional advertising and a firm’s social media activities may improve a firm’s performance with
respect to building the brand and encouraging customer acquisition. Moreover, firms can stimulate C2C messages through traditional advertising that in turn influences brand building and acquisition.
The study has several limitations providing fruitful avenues for future research that will be discussed in more detail during the presentation. Therefore, in this talk, I am going to present earlier research projects and provide an outlook into future research activities.

Short Bio:   Dr. Sonja Gensler works at the Institute for Value-Based Marketing at the University of Münster. Prior to joining the University of Münster in 2012, she held positions at the Goethe-University Frankfurt, VU Amsterdam, and University of Groningen. Her academic work focuses on the consequences of technological advancements for businesses and consumers. In her recent research she investigated the showrooming phenomenon, the relation between online consumer reviews and customers’ return behavior as well as the effectiveness of (digital) marketing channels.

Her research has been published in journals such as the Journal of Marketing, International Journal of Research in Marketing (IJRM), Journal of Retailing, Journal of Interactive Marketing, Journal of Product Innovation Management, and European Journal of Operational Research. She is member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Interactive Marketing and serves as an ad-hoc reviewer for International Journal of Research in Marketing (IJRM), Journal of Service Research, Journal of Business Research, Journal of Interactive Marketing, and European Journal of Operational Research.