Welcome to the Chair of Product-Market Relations at the University of Twente.
Value offerings that adequately match market demands are the fundamental driver of creating, capturing and sustaining value for the focal firm. Designing products, services, and product-service systems that contain a proper market fit is however a complex process, which is cross-disciplinary by nature and spans various key functions (e.g., strategic marketing management, product design, and innovation management). To more holistically respond to customer needs and wants, input from various internal (e.g., marketing, product development) and external (e.g., customers, suppliers) stakeholders is required that becomes integrated throughout all levels of a product, i.e., also including its packaging, brand, and after-sales services.
Our chair addresses a broad array of topics in this intersection of marketing, management, and design. By our work, we attempt to get a better understanding of how firms can create a mutually beneficial exchange between a firm and its customers and to sustain that exchange in competitive and dynamic markets. This also implies a more profound understanding of the role of a firm’s overarching business model, including a firm's strategy for new product development, customer relationship management, partnering, and branding. We specifically examine issues related to business model design (e.g., circular business models), sustainable packaging design, and customer engagement (e.g., customer co-branding). Our chair further focuses on the development and application of empirical methods of marketing and design research, in particular variance-based structural equation modeling, for investigating the drivers of market success.
Throughout our research, we seek close contact with industry partners, which not only represent the object of our research but also our target group. The results of our research have been published in leading marketing and management journals, including European Journal of Marketing, European Journal of Information Systems, Industrial Marketing Management, International Journal of Research in Marketing, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Journal of Advertising, Journal of Business Research, Journal of Operations Management, Journal of Supply Chain Management, MIS Quarterly, Organizational Research Methods, and Structural Equation Modeling.