Advanced Topics and Experimental Methods in Consumer Research

The course has two major goals:

1. To expose students to research in specific areas of consumer research and marketing and to familiarize them with findings in these areas. These broad areas are emotions, sustainable consumer behavior, and human-computer interactions.
2. To equip students with abilities to conceptualize, design and implement original consumer behavior research, particularly experimental research.

Students will read a set of core readings in order to gain knowledge of relevant theoretical foundations, methodological norms, and recent findings. We will discuss papers published at top journals in consumer behavior, marketing, management, and psychology. One of the best ways for doctoral candidates to understand a research area is to critically review articles describing research in that area. The course will challenge students to adopt a critical stance when reading papers. This approach provides a deeper understanding of specific issues, a better appreciation of the research process, and training in research skills. The class discussion will evaluate the articles and the reviews.

Students will learn to identify gaps in the literature or to apply a research problem to unexplored related phenomena. 

Moreover, the second aim of this course is that students develop their own actionable research question and methodological plan. For this, they will be able to collect first data online. Students will present their idea and potential results and give one another feedback on these ideas.

After completing this course, students will be able to define research questions in various domains of consumer behavior and in different empirical settings, they will know how to implement their research questions into an actionable experimental design, and they will be aware of potential problems and (dis)advantages in their research design.

Days:
11.09.2026 (Online)
14.-16.09.2026 (Presence, 2.5 days); following this course part, participants will have the opportunity to attend the Early Researcher Symposium as part of the EMAC Fall Conference 2026 or the conference itself in Bremen (https://www.uni-bremen.de/markstones/emac-2026). A separate registration for these events is necessary though.
06.10.2026 (Online)


Registration Deadline: August 9, 2026