Marketing and Communication profile initiative
The Marketing and Communication profile initiative at Universität Hamburg is seeking someone for applied teaching and research in the field of unstructured data (e.g., text, images, videos, traces of behavior) within the context of the analysis and generation of automated communication at a predominantly international level. The professorship should use state-of-the-art methods in data science and take an empirical and quantitative approach to analyzing and shaping communication processes between people and between people and machines.
The professorship is interdisciplinary. Depending upon the applicant’s specific interests, the professorship may be anchored in business administration (e.g., the Management Transfer Lab), informatics, or communication. Important requirements for the professorship include methodological expertise in and experience with applied data science (especially with regard to unstructured data) and marketing and communication. Links to knowledge exchange are desirable.
We further expect applicants to have published in prestigious international journals in line with the standards of the field (as documented in recognized international rankings and journals) and to have a relevant, high-level international academic network. Teaching should focus especially on applied courses in the field of marketing and communication and data science, and be aimed at students beyond the participating faculties.
The University profile initiative Marketing and Communication includes the marketing and communication research area in the Faculty of Business Administration and is linked to the Leibniz Institute for Media Research | Hans-Bredow-Institut (HBI), as well as the Department of Informatics in the Faculty of Mathematics, Informatics and Natural Sciences and the Department of Social Sciences (journalism and communication sciences) in the Faculty of Business, Economics and Social Sciences. It also incorporates linguistics (Department of Humanities). The combination of these research-oriented disciplines at Universität Hamburg and the HBI is unique in Germany and Europe and it represents a growing field. The participating scientists and institutions have already worked together intensively on a number of research projects at the junction of communication, marketing, social sciences, text analysis, and multimodal data.
The profile initiative focuses on digitalization-driven changes in central elements of communication, e.g., providers and consumers in the marketing of products and services, and the effects on the market-oriented leadership of companies and organization. (a) Datafication: Digitalization penetrates all areas of life and leaves behind large quantities of data. For example, movement (e.g., corona apps), communication type and content, and social relationships can be digitally recorded; (b) Algorithms: To make large data quantities usable, we need to apply and adapt new methods and algorithms, which will be developed in the area of data science; (c) Communication channels: At the same time, innovative communication channels (e.g., new social media, smart devices such as Alexa) are changing how individuals use media and information.
The innovative observation possibilities (datafication), analysis (using data science, informatics, and AI), and use (especially for marketing purposes) of large quantities of data with regard to individual communication processes have turned the topic of automated communication into a central topic of the future. It is of significant economic relevance (e.g., fundamental changes to social media and communication processes between companies and customers), significant social relevance (e.g., with regard to dis- and misinformation, etc.), and significant technological relevance (as an important engine of machine learning). These also have great potential for external funding and a high degree of knowledge-exchange relevance (e.g., start-ups). Thus, the profile initiative works closely with Universität Hamburg’s Knowledge Exchange Agency.
An important activity of the profile initiative so far has been the establishment of the first purely business-focused German Research Foundation research unit (FOR 1452) How Social Media is Changing Marketing (2015–2021). Another important initiative is the BERD@NFDI: NFDI for Business, Economic and Related Data that was recently granted funding. The application-oriented research data platform integrates unstructured data and machine learning. Furthermore, the profile initiative is involved in the creation of a house of computing and data science at Universität Hamburg. The initiative will be flanked by knowledge exchange activities with EXIST funding and by Federal Ministry of Education and Research projects. The professorship is situated at the junction between these initiatives and should contribute substantially to their further development.
The preliminary work in marketing, data science (informatics and business administration), journalism, communications in cooperation with the HBI, and informatics provides a very good basis for research on automated communication, a topic that will become central to the profile initiative. Automated communication is leading to a significant transformation in the business sector and society at large. The automated-communication research will be devoted to these connections and will mark a continuation of the work done thus far. Researchers will look at changes in the creative sector, new consumer and interaction behavior, and added value by focusing on central communication paths between (media) companies and consumers and companies and companies.
Contacts
- Prof. Dr. Henrik Sattler, profile initiative spokesperson, henrik.sattler"AT"uni-hamburg.de
- Prof. Michel Clement, profile initiative’s deputy spokesperson, michel.clement"AT"uni-hamburg.de