Marketing

Owing to digitalisation and, more recently, the use of artificial intelligence, consumers are increasingly exposed to personalised offers. Personalisation adapts elements of the marketing mix to individual consumers based on their consumer profile (i.e. preferences, interactions and other customer characteristics). Personalisation can take many forms, depending on whether it is driven by the consumer or the firm, who the target is (an individual consumer or a group), and what is being personalised (e.g. product, service, communication, pricing or marketing channels). 

Compared with traditional approaches, hyper-personalisation relies on consumer databases, AI algorithms and automation. In this way, hyper-personalisation creates high-quality, context-dependent offers to enhance the customer experience. Brands and retailers can calibrate individual offers in line with real-time context (i.e. time, location, actual browsing behaviour, etc.). Hyper-personalisation can generate a sense of exclusivity and foster deeper emotional connections with users, but it also raises ethical concerns related to privacy and the use of sensitive personal data. 

Brands and retailers expect that applying personalisation and hyper-personalisation will increase the effectiveness of marketing and sales activities, leading to higher profitability. Doctoral research in this area may focus on impacts on consumer behaviour. There is also an opportunity to use the retail panel database developed by the research group to analyse the effect of retail innovations related to personalisation on firm performance. 

The changing environment of marketing communications, shaped by phenomena such as the growing influence of empowered consumers and the “tribalisation” of society, poses serious challenges for organisations seeking to communicate effectively. Digital technologies amplify behaviours such as deliberate ad avoidance and the discovery of other consumers’ experiences through virtual communities, online word of mouth and user-generated content. 

As a result, not only has the environment of advertising consumption become increasingly fragmented, but consumers themselves also play, and wish to play, a greater role in creating marketing (communications) value, which previously tended to flow in a one-way direction from organisations. In today’s marketing communications space, questions of effectiveness and efficiency in reaching messages and audiences have become pressing again. Companies must also contend with an increasing number of online “wildfires”, and even value destruction driven by users. 

Understanding the dynamics behind these phenomena is becoming critical. Yet organisations that often cling rigidly to earlier communication paradigms frequently overlook this, creating further tensions between consumers and brands. 

The real and the virtual worlds coexist in our lives. Their separation and identification have often been central themes in philosophy and religion (see solipsism, or Buddhism/Hinduism and the concept of “Māyā”). In Plato’s allegory of the cave, the chained person who is released and comes to know reality can never again feel at ease in the cave. By contrast, today’s consumer often feels a strong attraction to what the virtual world of a (subcultural) “cave” can offer. 

Alongside human development and the emergence of abstract thinking, shared social constructions and virtual elements/realities have appeared. Beyond helping us understand and explain the world, these constructions have offered higher-level intellectual experiences, identity formation and new forms of entertainment: novels, the arts, theatre, the film industry, role-playing and video games, and even subcultural “realities” developed across generations and expressed through slang and memes. 

Technological progress and the rise of AI create further contexts, such as virtual (AI) companions. 

From a marketing perspective, this phenomenon appears not only in the development of such products and services, but also in their communication, brand building and storytelling. The research group aims to explore the consumer side of this field: people’s motivations, roles, behaviours and participation in these processes. The research programme contributes to a deeper understanding of general patterns of consumer behaviour and may also support practitioners in making better-informed decisions. 

The economic importance of design is continuously increasing, and it is increasingly seen as a source of competitive advantage, enabling the formulation of new and timely research questions. Our programme builds on the design approach developed by the research group: design communication, i.e. DIS:CO. 

Our goal is to connect academic and business practice, science and application, theory and practice in real time. During their PhD studies, participants may create a new output in line with their own ambitions, including as start-up founders: an operating system, business model, service or product. They then examine this design process with scholarly rigour, whether focusing on the creative process itself, design, leadership or user decision-making, or the practical and theoretical fit of the innovation. In this way, PhD candidates represent both the researcher and the designer perspectives within their doctoral work. 

Our research group aims to explore how AI-based technology will transform the production, operation and use of services over the next decade. We believe AI is not merely a new tool in the world of services, but a broader force that redefines consumer decision-making and corporate value creation. 

Our starting point is the insight that AI can influence every step of the decision process, from problem recognition to choice, experience and evaluation. As a result, companies’ marketing strategies are also changing fundamentally: automated forecasting, real-time data use, personalised recommender systems and virtual/chatbot assistants are becoming the new norm. 

At the same time, the role of the frontline is being reshaped. In the service environment of the future, collaboration between humans and machines will become decisive, with the service experience shaped partly through algorithms and partly through human interaction. For companies, the quality and quantity of customer data, and the effectiveness of the algorithms processing it, will be among the most important sources of success. 

We are also committed to examining and applying AI in ways that preserve the human-centred nature of services. In the spirit of the Digital Humanism Initiative, we strive to ensure that new technologies are not only more efficient, but also provide a humane experience for users and employees. 

This topic may be particularly appealing to prospective doctoral students who wish to contribute to shaping the future of services and marketing practice. The research group’s work is supported by an OTKA grant from the National Research, Development and Innovation Office (NRDI). 

The convergence of digital marketing and artificial intelligence marks a new era in marketing research, creating an exciting space at the intersection of technology and behavioural science. Our research group examines how AI-based technologies, virtual influencers and chatbots reshape the consumer experience, and why humanoid digital characters can evoke both attraction and discomfort (the Uncanny Valley). 

On the corporate side, our research focuses on AI-related dynamic marketing capabilities and their impact on competitive advantage and innovativeness. Applicants have a unique opportunity to join the research group and work in international collaboration with leading scholars abroad. The group’s work is supported by the National Research, Development and Innovation Office (NRDI). 

Emotional attachment to brands has loosened, much like human relationships have changed over the past decade. Brands do everything they can to create an appealing brand identity. They personalise their services and communication by focusing on shared values and positive customer experiences, and they use storytelling in the hope that it will resonate with consumers. 

In our research, we aim to observe the person behind the consumer, understanding the multifaceted nature of emotional attachment to people and brands on digital social platforms and/or in different cultural contexts. 

The research group aims, among other things, to use biometric and consumer neuroscience methods to explore how consumers see, feel and process digital brand communication. Our core assumption is that attention, emotion and decision-making in digital environments often differ from what questionnaire-based or declarative methods suggest. For this reason, we study user experience by combining eye-tracking, galvanic skin response (GSR) and experimental tasks (e.g. decision and implicit tests). 

Our key research directions include, among others: comparing AI-generated and human-made adverts; exploring the mechanisms of socially responsible and sustainability messages; examining older consumers’ digital information processing; B2B markets; and omnichannel marketing. Our aim is to contribute to the development of ethical, human-centred digital marketing and brand strategies. 

The research group also draws on the infrastructure of the Corvinus NEDIMARC – Neuro and Digital Marketing Research Centre (eye-tracking, GSR). Incoming PhD students will have opportunities to participate in international collaborations, design and implement mixed-method experiments, and produce high-level academic publications at the intersection of digital marketing and consumer neuroscience. 

A photograph combines realistic representation with meaning-making abstraction, making it suitable as an explanatory or interpretive tool in scientific work as well. Its scientific strength lies in the fact that it can function simultaneously as data, as a surface for interpretation and as a narrative articulation. 

Photography captures and makes visible what often remains hidden in everyday observation: objects, arrangements, the structure of spaces, relationships between bodies, or even patterns of consumption. Photography (and film) can be transformed into qualitative research data. 

Photography can also evoke personal and collective stories. Research participants, as creators or interviewees, respond not only to the research question, but also to their own photographs or films, which can activate emotions, memories and layers of meaning. 

Photo and video elicitation and videography, as both empirical and artistic outputs, can be interpreted within approaches such as design science research, design communication, visual anthropology, psychology and arts-based research. The research field can be examined in the context of both physical and virtual spaces today, including human and non-human events.