Michael Haenlein

ESCP Business School | ESCP · Department of Marketing

Since their beginnings, virtual worlds have experienced two major media hypes in their short lifetime—the first in 2003 after the launch of Second Life and the second in 2021, with Mark Zuckerberg announcing his strategy for the Metaverse. Most academic research on virtual worlds emerged between these two peaks of interest. This article delves into...

During the past quarter-century, digital technologies-based innovations for creating, communicating, and delivering products of value to customers have significantly risen in importance to the competitiveness of firms. Digital technologies-based innovations have been transformational in numerous ways, such as the impact on firms’ marketing behavior...

Variance-based SEM, also known under the term partial least squares (PLS) analysis, is an approach that has gained increasing interest among marketing researchers in recent years. During the last 25 years, more than 30 articles have been published in leading marketing journals that have applied this approach instead of the more traditional alternat...

Artificial intelligence (AI) will substantially impact retailing. Building on past research and from interviews with senior managers, we examine how senior retailing managers should think about adopting AI, involving factors such as the extent to which an AI application is customer-facing, the amount of value creation, whether the AI application is...

Crowdfunding entrepreneurs increasingly use videos to present their venture and themselves to potential investors. To do this effectively, they consciously or unconsciously use several impression management techniques. Based on human and automated (AI-based analysis) of technology-related videos, we determine which impression management techniques...

Digital transformation and resultant business model innovation have fundamentally altered consumers’ expectations and behaviors, putting immense pressure on traditional firms, and disrupting numerous markets. Drawing on extant literature, we identify three stages of digital transformation: digitization, digitalization, and digital transformation. W...

Stremersch (2020) and Wierenga (2020) provide valuable reactions to our ideas in Kohli and Haenlein (2020). We highlight some of their suggestions we found particularly helpful and use this opportunity to clarify some of our ideas. In particular, we like the concept of a “project funnel,” the notions of “vertical drift” and “lateral drift,” and a “...

Influencer marketing represents a $10 billion industry in 2020 and is becoming of increasing relevance for many firms, especially those operating in a business-to-consumer environment. Few firms in the fashion, beauty, travel, food, or beverage industries are running marketing campaigns these days that do not include, at least to some share, a coll...

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and 5G connectivity have been identified as drivers of the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution (FIR). AI and 5G, through emerging technologies such as blockchain, gene editing, Internet of Things sensors, nanotechnology, or 3D printing, accelerates a blurring of boundaries between digital, biological and physical sph...

Contrary to the previous leadership theories, which focus on specific and narrow aspects of leadership such as employee characteristics, leader's authenticity, or boundary spanning, the bounded leadership theory is a broad and complex concept. It takes simultaneously many constraints, which are related to activities on an individual, team, organiza...

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and 5G connectivity have been identified as drivers of the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution (FIR). AI and 5G, through emerging technologies such as blockchain, gene editing, Internet of Things sensors, nanotechnology, or 3D printing accelerate a blurring of boundaries between digital, biological, and physical sphe...

Academic research in marketing has produced many useful insights and tools over the years. Lately, however, an increasing number of scholars have voiced concern that much of the current academic research is not particularly useful. We explore reasons why this may be the case, and offer a set of recommendations to address them. We first identify thr...

In a similar way as consumers use social media to spread word-of-mouth about brands and firms, employees perform similar activities when posting company-related content on social media. Such posts can be of significant importance for future employees who use them as supposedly unbiased information of firm attractiveness. Hence better understanding...

A decade ago, we published an article in Business Horizons about the challenges and opportunities of social media with a call to action: “Users of the world, unite!” To celebrate its anniversary, we look at artificial intelligence and the need to create the rules necessary for peaceful coexistence between humanity and AI. Hence, we now are urging:...

Electronic word of mouth (eWOM), especially on online platforms such as Twitter, is a topic of interest for many C-suite executives. Yet little is understood about competitive spillover effects in eWOM, especially among mature brands in fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) markets. In this article we analyze the entire corpus of tweets of two main FMC...

This introduction to this special issue discusses artificial intelligence (AI), commonly defined as “a system’s ability to interpret external data correctly, to learn from such data, and to use those learnings to achieve specific goals and tasks through flexible adaptation.” It summarizes seven articles published in this special issue that present...

Seeded Marketing Campaigns (SMCs) have become part of the marketing mix for many Fast-Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) companies in recent years. In addition to making large investments in advertising and sales promotions, these firms now encourage seed agents or micro-influencers to discuss brands with friends and acquaintances to create further value...

Artificial intelligence (AI)—defined as a system's ability to correctly interpret external data, to learn from such data, and to use those learnings to achieve specific goals and tasks through flexible adaptation—is a topic in nearly every boardroom and at many dinner tables. Yet, despite this prominence, AI is still a surprisingly fuzzy concept an...

Since its first entry into the literature discussion in the 1980s, customer relationship management (CRM) has found its way into nearly every company. Concepts like personalization, loyalty programs, and customer valuation are used regularly to interact with and prioritize customers. Unsurprisingly, this more widespread use has changed our understa...

In recent years, word-of-mouth (WOM) marketing has been the subject of considerable interest among managers and academics alike. However, there is very little common knowledge on what drives the value of WOM programs and how they should be designed to optimize value. Firms therefore frequently rely on relatively simple metrics to measure the succes...

Distance learning—that is, providing education to students who are separated by distance and in which the pedagogical material is planned and prepared by educational institutions—is a topic of regular interest in the popular and business press. In particular, MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses), which are open-access online courses that allow for u...

Collaborative projects—defined herein as social media applications that enable the joint and simultaneous creation of knowledge-related content by many end-users—have only recently received interest among a larger group of academics. This is surprising since applications such as wikis, social bookmarking sites, online forums, and review sites are p...

CRM has traditionally referred to a company managing relationships with customers. The rise of social media, which has connected and empowered customers, challenges this fundamental raison d'etre. This paper examines how CRM needs to adapt to the rise of social media. The convergence of social media and CRM creates pitfalls and opportunities, which...

Historically, when targeting potential adopters of a new product, firms have tended to focus first on people with disproportional effect on others, often labeled "opinion leaders." The authors highlight the benefit of targeting customers with high lifetime value (CLV), or "revenue leaders." The authors argue that targeting revenue leaders can creat...

The impact of social factors on individual-level decision making has been a subject of regular interest within the marketing discipline. Yet, studies analyzing social interactions and social contagion have, to a very large extent, focused on the importance of social interactions in the customer acquisition process and have relied on the use of undi...

Although the hype around virtual worlds has slowed down in recent months, chances are high that this type of social media will increase in importance over years to come. Many companies which pioneered in entering virtual worlds have left these environments after their first steps. One of the reasons for these initial failures is likely the lack of...

Purpose The management of unprofitable customer relationships and particularly their abandonment is a topic that has received increasing interest among practitioners and researchers over recent years. Within this manuscript, the authors aim to analyze the impact of unprofitable customer abandonment on the abandoning firm's current customers, specif...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to provide a viewpoint on the historical roots and future evolution of social media. Design/methodology/approach – This paper provides a summary of the authors' previous research and experience in the area of social media. Findings – This paper contains practical insights on the consumer use and business pot...

Social media applications—including collaborative projects, micro-blogs/blogs, content communities, social networking sites, and virtual worlds—have become part of the standard communication repertoire for many companies. Today, with the creation of increasingly powerful mobile devices, numerous social media applications have gone mobile and new en...

Les opportunités que les médias sociaux offrent aux consommateurs, aux entreprises et aux chercheurs en marketing sont quasiment infinies, comme le montrent, entre autres, les articles de ce numéro spécial. Cependant, nous ne devrions pas oublier que ces opportunités, tout aussi prometteuses qu'elles puissent sembler, ne surviennent pas toutes seul...

The concept of viral marketing has been discussed in the literature for over 15 years, since Jeffrey Rayport first introduced the term in 1996. However, the more widespread use of social media has recently pushed this idea to a whole new level. We provide insight into the relationship between social media and viral marketing, and illustrate the six...

The technology acceptance model (TAM) is arguably one of the most widely used models for studying user adoption in the information systems discipline and has started to be used increasingly within the marketing area. While two of its three main hypotheses have received consistent empirical support, the same is not true for the remaining relationshi...

Micro-blogs (e.g., Twitter, Jaiku, Plurk, Tumblr) are starting to become an established category within the general group of social media. Yet, while they rapidly gain interest among consumers and companies alike, there is no evidence to explain why anybody should be interested in an application that is limited to the exchange of short, 140-charact...

Social network analysis has been a topic of regular interest in the marketing discipline. Previous studies have largely focused on similarities in product/brand choice decisions within the same social network, often in the context of product innovation adoption. Not much is known, however, about the importance of social network effects once custome...

Due to the increasing use of customer databases in many industries, companies nowadays have high visibility about the profitability of individual-level client relationships. This has led some researchers to recommend the implementation of value-based customer management strategies, including the abandonment of unprofitable customer relationships. I...

Britney Spears is one of the most successful female recording artists in contemporary music, world-wide. Herein, we analyze how Britney Spears and her team of employees rely on social media applications to communicate around this pop icon, and create and maintain her celebrity brand image. Specifically, we look at the use of social media during the...

Researchers and practitioners alike have speculated that virtual social worlds and social gaming will likely be major platforms for business operations in the future. This chapter shows how major IT companies make use of virtual social worlds (esp. the online application Second Life), focusing on the examples of Dell, Hewlett-Packard, International...

The management of unprofitable customer relationships and in particular their abandonment is a topic that has received increasing interest in both managerial decision making and academic research. However, little is known about the attitudinal and behavioral reactions that companies should expect from current and potential customers in response to...

Résumé Beaucoup d’entreprises se sont ruées sur Second Life et en sont revenues. Mais ces échecs ne doivent pas cacher les perspectives ouvertes par ce média.

The concept of Social Media is top of the agenda for many business executives today. Decision makers, as well as consultants, try to identify ways in which firms can make profitable use of applications such as Wikipedia, YouTube, Facebook, Second Life, and Twitter. Yet despite this interest, there seems to be very limited understanding of what the...

Variance-based SEM, also known under the term partial least squares (PLS) analysis, is an approach that has gained increasing interest among marketing researchers in recent years. During the last 25 years, more than 30 articles have been published in leading marketing journals that have applied this approach instead of the more traditional alternat...

Virtual social worlds, such as the Internet site Second Life, have acquired a high degree of popularity in the popular and business press. In this article we address the increasing importance of virtual social worlds, and discuss how companies can make use of their potential. We first present how virtual social worlds evolved historically, how they...

The authors contributed equally to this work and are listed in alphabetical order. The authors thank the managers from the market research firm, Repères, especially François Abiven and Emilie Labidoire, for their help during data collection. The authors may be contacted at the following e-mail addresses: haenlein@escpeurope.eu; mail@andreaskaplan.e...

Les hyperréalités virtuelles, connues aussi sous le nom de mondes sociaux virtuels, ont connu un intérêt managérial grandissant durant ces dernières années. Bien qu'elles aient également fait l'objet d'un certain intérêt dans la littérature académique, la mesure de l'influence de la présence des entreprises dans Second Life sur l'attitude envers la...

Several months ago, the virtual social world “Second Life” (SL) received considerable interest in both the popular and business press. Based on a series of 29 qualitative, in-depth interviews, this article investigates what types of behaviors consumers show within this environment and what business opportunities it offers for companies. The results...

Summary Although the State and its permanent representation, public administration, account for nearly half of GDP in the European Union, there is a surprising decline in research dealing with this sector in the management and marketing literature over the last 10Â years. The objective of our manuscript is to show how theoretical perspectives, whic...

The widespread use of customer relationship management (CRM) applications has provided companies with increasingly detailed insights into the profitability of their individual-level customer relationships. Historically, this information has primarily been used to identify the most profitable customers and to define ways for serving them in an optim...

Variance-based SEM, also known under the term partial least squares (PLS) analysis, is an approach that has gained increasing interest among marketing researchers in recent years. During the last 25 years, more than 30 articles have been published in leading marketing journals that have applied this approach instead of the more traditional alternat...

During the past decade, the retail banking industry started to face a set of radically new challenges that had an overall negative impact on industry margin and profitability. In response to these challenges, more and more retail banks have focused on increasing the scale of their operations, which has led to a rising importance of mergers and acqu...

Mass customization has received considerable interest among researchers. However, although many authors have analyzed this concept from different angles, the question of which factors can be used to spot customers most likely to adopt a mass-customized product has not been answered to a satisfactory extent until now. This article explicitly deals w...

In recent years, several authors have developed models that focus on the allocation of scarce marketing resources based on customer lifetime value (CLV). These approaches use CLV to develop a rank order of customers and recommend devoting more resources to customers with higher ranks. However, it has been discussed in the literature that a simple n...

In recent years, several authors have developed models that focus on the allocation of scarce marketing resources based on customer lifetime value (CLV). These approaches use CLV to develop a rank order of customers and recommend devoting more resources to customers with higher ranks. However, it has been discussed in the literature that a simple n...

Although mass customization, a term introduced by Davis (1987) to describe the oxymoron of mass producing customized products, has been part of research for more than a decade, literature has not come up with a commonly accepted definition of this term up to now. The present article attempts to close this gap by proposing a definition of traditiona...

Since the introduction of covariance-based structural equation modeling (SEM) by Jöreskog in 1973, this technique has been received with considerable interest among empirical researchers. However, the predominance of LISREL, certainly the most well-known tool to perform this kind of analysis, has led to the fact that not all re-searchers are aware...

The paper focuses on the relative importance of different trust constructs for the seller–buyer relationship in commercial transactions over the Internet. Following the work of Rousseau et al (1998) and McKnight and Chervany (2002), we analysed the relative importance of three different trust constructs (institutional, calculative and relational tr...