Essays on Learning from Consumer Response to Support Marketing Mix Decisions Empirical Applications to Decisions on Product, Price and Promotion

Abstract

This research has been conducted under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Sönke Albers at his Department of Innovation, New Media, and Marketing at the Christian-Albrechts-University at Kiel. Furthermore the doctoral thesis has been funded by a research scholarship granted by the Kühne Logistics University Hamburg.
 
 While the first methodological article (A) presents a comprehensive overview of the technique of limited dependent variables response modeling, the second article (B) proposes a decompositional objective method to explain and predict consumers’ per- ceived similarities of aesthetic product designs. While article B focuses on decision support for shaping and positioning aesthetic product designs, study (C) analyzes con- sumers’ responsiveness to price and technical product attributes in a global marketing context by investigating marketing elasticities for a wide range of countries all over the world. In addition to the product and price perspective, study (D) shows how online promotion in terms of product videos affect consumers’ shopping behavior. Fi- nally study (E) proposes a new profit margin-oriented targeting approach that (i) helps to assess the economic profitability of targeted promotion efforts in advance and (ii) shows how a profit margin-based targeting should be applied.