Marketing and the Connected Customer, Professor Gerrit van Bruggen, Rotterdam School of Management
Event Date: 22 September 2022
Speaker: Gerrit van Bruggen, Professor of Marketing at Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University (RSM)
Abstract: Over time advances in Information Technology have strongly affected Marketing and Marketing Science. For example, scanning technology led to an explosion of data. These data combined with the computing power that made the development of sophisticated models possible, have greatly improved marketers’ insights in their customers’ behavior and on the effectiveness of marketing activities. In some sense this may have created an idea that markets and customers would become controllable and that marketing could be (partially) automated. Recently, Social Technologies are having a big impact. Customers are increasingly connected and this is greatly changing the impact and the role of the marketer and the firm. Marketing’s control of the customer seems to decrease rather than to increase. In this presentation, I will discuss the challenges and opportunities the new reality offers for marketers. I will especially focus on research in the domain of viral marketing and some of the key decisions marketers face to win back control and maximize the effects of marketing efforts.
Biography: Gerrit van Bruggen is a Professor of Marketing at Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University (RSM). Professor van Bruggen's primary research interest lies in strategic marketing issues and the impact of information technology and information systems on marketing strategy and decision making. His research has been published in the field’s leading scientific journals including Marketing Science, the Journal of Marketing, the Journal of Marketing Research, Management Science, MIS Quarterly, Information Systems Research and Interfaces. He is a regular speaker at international management conferences and an experienced teacher at the executive level. He is a former visiting scholar at the Smeal College of Business Administration at Pennsylvania State University in the US. Professor van Bruggen has a PhD in marketing from Erasmus University Rotterdam and an MSc in agricultural economics specialising in marketing and operations research from Wageningen University
Published: 30 October 2025
