Critical Thinking and Social Media (Univ. Prof. Dr. Christina Schamp)

The constant availability and flood of data and content online presents consumers with the challenge of quickly classifying content and drawing their conclusions from it. As a byproduct of digitalization, consumers therefore increasingly need the ability to critically reflect on content they see online. Many current developments in the area of social media underline this need. For instance, consumers and companies alike are confronted with fake news, fake reviews, content produced by machine learning algorithms, or moral outcry, social firestorms, or cancel culture.

Despite the growing relevance of these phenomena, marketing scholars have only just begun to explore these moral dimensions of social media consumption.

This course is designed to sensitize the participants to how digital content might be biased – sometimes even independent of the intentions of the content producer – and can impair critical thinking when dealing with social media data and content.

Artificial Intelligence in the Consumer Experience (Dr. Melanie Clegg)

From ranking of news media and social media content to the communication via voice assistants and chat bots - artificial intelligence (AI) is ubiquitous. Considering the huge potential of artificial intelligence, business leaders and marketing scholars need to attain a deeper understanding of chances and challenges of AI, and its multiple implications on consumers.

This course is designed to provide participants with a deeper understanding about the applications of AI in consumer and marketing contexts, as well as psychological mechanisms and ethical considerations that influence consumer experiences with different aspects of AI (e.g., data collection, classification, task delegation, decision making, social and communication).

Although we cover the theory of the technology behind AI (no coding required), the main focus is its application in marketing and consumer contexts. The course will start with foundations and a definition of AI. It will then dive into different applications of AI in the consumer experience by analyzing and discussing cutting-edge research and practical examples. Based on this theoretical foundation and enriched by guest lectures, students will develop an own business problem or research question related to the successful implementation of AI in a marketing or consumer context.

Marketing Study Project (Univ. Prof. Dr. Nils Wlömert, Univ. Prof. Dr. Christina Schamp)

The marketing study project gives MSc Marketing students the opportunity of making a synthesis of the prior knowledge they acquired throughout the program, and of showing their ability to translate it into practice. Parallel to this course students are pursuing an empirical marketing project as part of their Master's thesis.

This course offers a stimulating environment to learn and to critically discuss how to fine-tune research questions, how to derive an empirical approach to provide answers to these questions,  how to select adequate methods to analyze quantitative and/or qualitative data, and how to translate empirical findings into managerial value and to provide management implications of our research. Moreover, this course offers a platform for MSc Marketing students to meet and discuss their marketing study projects with each other and experienced researchers.

Marketing Insights from Multimedia Data on Social Media (Univ. Prof. Dr. Christina Schamp)

Today's marketers and researchers are faced with an enormous amount and variety of data that consumers share through social media - from interactions with companies and product feedback via text messages, to images and videos posted by branded experiences on Instagram, Snapchat or TikTok. At the same time, companies also strive to interact with their customers on various social media channels by producing compelling and relevant multimedia content for their target audiences.

This seminar combines current research on successful multimedia content on social media with a with a practical workshop on storytelling. The course is additionally rounded off by the cooperation with Campaigning Bureau, one of the leading agencies for the design of successful social media campaigns. The outcome of the seminar are YouTube-like videos in which the students present a relevant social media topic in a creative way.