Ulrike Kaiser is Associate Professor at the Institute for Marketing Management and Academic Director of the MSc Marketing Program at the Department of Marketing, WU Vienna. Prior to joining the marketing group, she was an assistant professor at the Institute for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, WU Vienna, where she also completed her doctoral studies. For her doctoral thesis, she has received the Rudolf Sallinger Award 2011 and Stephan Koren Award 2012.

Her research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of consumer behavior, products and brand management, and novel business models. Her recent research focuses on the relationship between consumers and businesses and how the changing role of consumers affects the way products are developed, marketed and consumed. For example, a recent focus was on self-customization and its consequences on both consumers and brands. In one of the current projects she looks at how businesses can leverage new technologies to make work and consumption more meaningful by reducing the alienation between consumers and producers. Other topics of interest are millennials as consumers and the sharing economy. 

The MAK project:

Over a four months period we ran a research lab in the Austrian Museum of Applied Arts (MAK). The lab was part of the exhibition “handiCRAFT – Traditional Skills in the Digital Age” (14.12.16 – 9.4.17).  Museum visitors were assigned the role of either producer or consumer and completed small tasks or questionnaires from their assigned perspective. Research questions were constantly adapted and extended during the course of the exhibition. With the help of museum visitors, we tried to generate a comprehensive picture of the role played by people along the entire value creation chain. This research method – in which museum visitors participated in a constantly evolving experiment – was itself an experiment.