On 1 October 2020, Professor Dr. André Marchand took over as successor to Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Löbler as the Marketing Professorship at Leipzig University and presents his main areas of work in a short interview.
Dear Professor Marchand, welcome to the University of Leipzig! A typical welcome question is: Did you have a pleasant journey?
Thank you very much, I am very happy to be here. My arrival was very pleasant, a bit like returning to a second home. I have already lived in Leipzig for a few years. That was during my doctoral period at the Bauhaus University in Weimar and at the beginning of my habilitation period at the WWU Münster. At that time, for example, the Höfe am Brühl were still under construction and the new Augustusplatz campus had just been completed. To be able to be here again as a professor is something very special.
What are your plans for your first 100 days?
There is a lot to organise at the beginning. First of all, staff have to be selected and the offices set up. I'm bringing some of my team from the University of Cologne with me, but I'm also looking for new staff. The lecture period begins on 26 October, so new courses have to be prepared. The current third-party funded and research projects also continue, and new projects are ready to start. Apart from the organisational aspects, the first time at a new faculty is of course a time of getting to know each other. I have already met some of my new colleagues at the University of Leipzig in person and received a very warm welcome. Now I'm looking forward to getting to know the students soon as well. I would also like to establish more contacts with companies, e.g. for practice-related research projects and guest lectures. Marketing is an applied science, so it is important to me that marketing research and teaching meet the highest standards scientifically while being relevant and applicable to companies. I want to focus on future-oriented problems, generate knowledge about them and make it useful for society through transfer. Of course, something like this doesn't work alone, which is why my team supports me in this, and we cooperate internationally with scientists from different subjects and with different specialisations.
That sounds exciting. In what area are you researching?
Central to my research is the digital transformation in marketing. It affects all industries and business areas. There is an incredible amount going on, and that opens up a flood of new research questions, some of which I hope to answer in the near future. Look, for example, at how corporate communication is changing, from classic advertising to interactive exchange processes in social networks. But consumer behaviour has also changed and continues to change: most conversations about products and services take place in the digital space, consumers inform themselves on the internet, they order in online shops, they get upset in social media when something doesn't work and they praise there when they are enthusiastic about something, and many things are bought and used directly digitally, think of e-books or music, but also car sharing offers benefit from digital innovations. Driven by the coronavirus pandemic, we are currently even experiencing an acceleration of the digital transformation in many areas.
On the subject of the coronavirus pandemic, many students are wondering what this means for their studies. The summer semester 2020 was dominated by online teaching. How will it be in the winter semester, do you have any plans there?
Yes, the summer semester was indeed different from previous semesters. Shortly after I returned to Germany from a research stay at the University of Sydney in March, it became clear that we would have to convert teaching to digital formats within a few weeks. The studies were moved to the home office and many familiar processes changed in a short time. My lectures at the University of Cologne took place as video conferences. That was unusual at first. Suddenly you only exchanged information via camera and microphone, and you didn't have the same opportunity to read the students' faces to see if something was unclear, and so on. Due to the closures of the KiTas and schools, it was an additional challenge for me as a father, as it was for many other parents, that the whole changeover had to be mastered without much additional preparation time. My team and I looked for creative solutions to successfully convert teaching to digital formats. Our affinity for digital media was certainly helpful. Instead of mourning a lost semester of attendance, we accepted the challenge of the changed conditions. For example, we created an interactive co-commentary situation during lectures and incorporated online quiz elements. That worked well. The exam also ran differently than usual. I still vividly remember a situation a few years ago where I said at a ZEIT congress that I envision digital exams in the future where all participants can use the internet, just like in later professional life. That caused a storm of indignation in the audience at the time. That would be far too easy, the students would then not have to learn anything, was the common fear. The mention that digital systems with artificial intelligence are better than us humans at memorisation worried the audience even more. This summer, we were able to try it out. We designed a digital exam that participants could write on their computers from home, with all the internet resources they wanted to use.
And then they all had a 1.0?
That's what you might think, but in fact the exam turned out very similarly to the earlier exams that had been written in the university rooms without aids. Strictly speaking, it was even 0.1 grade points worse, but this is not statistically significant. This shows that such a digital format is definitely possible. I can well imagine that even after the pandemic, some aspects of the changed working life will be maintained, namely where digitalisation brings advantages. On the other hand, there are social aspects that cannot be fully digitised. I therefore think that in the future it will be a matter of a successful mix of digital and physical work and communication processes.
A successful mix is a good keyword. What is your mix of professional and private life? Do you have any hobbies?
For me, the wonderful thing about being a professor is that you turn your hobby into a profession. This blurs professional and private life. For example, when I watch a feature film nominated for several Oscars on Netflix in the evening, I also think about whether the importance of such nominations in the video-on-demand business tends to decrease or rather increase compared to the cinema business, or how marketing strategies for such films change due to a shift of premieres from the cinema to home entertainment. Technical innovations interest me - not only professionally, but also privately. For example, when the first e-scooters were installed in our district, I went there with my children, looked at the e-scooters and tried them out. If, for example, there is a new payment system in a supermarket on holiday, I usually try it out straight away. All this also inspires me to new research questions. But so far, most of the ideas have come to me while jogging or playing the piano, i.e. in moments of relaxation.
Then I wish you many more exciting discoveries and a good start at Leipzig University. Thank you very much for the interview.