A new experience: My first online examination today

It is amazing how a disastrous crisis like the Coronavirus can move things: After talking for more than 10 years about online education we at the University of Twente and many other of our colleagues worldwide switched to online education in one week. And not only the teaching but also examinations planned this week had to go on. After a busy time of testing platforms and changing the tests to make them suitable for students at home (with access to books, notes, summaries and Internet and even help from others) we had today the first such test with a class of 75 participants. Things went better than we had hoped and the students helped also with a serious and professional attitude. We will keep working on improvements but this was a good start

Working at home

Our education at the University of Twente is by now fully switched to online, even our guest speakers find this no problem

First day back to the Coronavirus enabled (ab-)normality in the University

From today, after a week of preparations, the University of Twente is officially back to the normal operational mode, with the difference that no physical activities are possible since all university buildings are closed and people are not even supposed to be on the street.

How was my first working day after a week of pause that was supposed to give us the time to adjust to our new online university reality? The day started with an online department meeting where almost every one of the department colleagues took enthusiastically part; we were all very glad to see each other again and share some of our experiences and stories.

The rest of the day was less pleasant, considering that the Coronavirus crisis, next to limiting our life and disrupting our daily routines, also forced the BMS Lab to close and hit badly the hospitality sector. What two events have to do with me? A lot I am afraid since both my classes in the 3^rd quartile is directly related to the BMS Lab and the tourist sector! My Master students following the course, Advanced Topic in Digital Marketing is making use of the BMS Lab equipment for their practical project (testing the usability of Websites) and my students of the undergraduate course    Digital Marketing is partnering with real companies (and this year it happens to be mainly companies from the hospitality sector in Twente) for their group project: developing and executing a 3-week AdWords marketing campaign.

You can imagine that my colleagues and I are hastily looking for alternatives since the master students can’t use the lab equipment for their experiments and the hospitality business is closed so not really interested in online advertising since no customer or potential customer can make use of their service. Finding and implementing alternatives for student projects in the middle of the quartile, when only 4 weeks are left, is not an easy business, I can tell you. Today I spent most of the day answering emails of hospitality businesses who have questions about the value of the project for them, trying to persuade them to stay on board. Also, student groups email me the whole day with worries about their projects. With two classes totaling 27 project groups and 17 external partners, you can imagine the volume of communication involved. Next to this, the “normal” business must go on, only online which means a lot of planning for doing things like lectures, meetings, project proposals, etc. in untested waters. Anyway, having survived the first day I am afraid that tomorrow will not be better. I know that I am not the only one facing such a situation, so I wish to all in this position all the best and strength

Google Scholar: The top cited reseacher on the topic of Digital Marketing Publishes research about Physics

I have published about this before but no one seems to listen 😠😠😠😠😠

Incredible that Google has not noticed anything. Looking to the rest of the list of top citations in Digital Marketing you see more mostly publications from the area of medicine and physics.
https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=8756923452479392502#editor/target=post;postID=7270393938855230832;onPublishedMenu=allposts;onClosedMenu=allposts;postNum=5;src=postname

https://scholar.google.nl/citations?view_op=search_authors&hl=en&mauthors=label:digital_marketing

AI as Education topic in the BMS Faculty

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is already part of the education and research in our department at the University of Twente. Not a common thing in a Business Administration study! Three examples of our work #utwente #ai #education #DigitalMarketing
https://www.utoday.nl/science/67758/using-ai-to-improve-education-at-the-ut

The 2020 BMS Faculty New Year's gathering

This morning the Faculty BMS had its annual New Year gathering in the atrium of the Ravelijn building. After a speech by the Dean, four special prizes were awarded. Proud that the cooperation award was given to my colleagues of the BMS Lab: congratulations for the great work and cooperation with us in Digital Marketing research#utwente #BMS #BMSlab #academia #education #technology #university #digitalmarketing

The UT study Int. Business Administration is a Top study in 2020

The University of Twente study International Business Administration / IBA (together with 5 more studies) is one of the Top Studies in The Netherlands in 2020. Considering that the University of Twente is a technical university this is a great achievement. The secret is the focus and excellence on topics utilizing the unique UT ecosystem to its maximum. Next to this, the UT is chosen as the best technical university of the Netherlands in 2020 (Source Keuzegids, 2020) #utwente #highereducation #businessadministration

https://www.utwente.nl/en/education/bachelor/top-rated-programmes/

The University of Twente was pronounced the best Technical University in the Netherlands for 2020

The hard work pays off: in 2020 the University of Twente is the best technical university in the Netherlands (although not the best known) and the International Business Administration is a Top-rated program for the first time

Proud to be part of the International Business Administration and the Communication Science programs
https://www.utwente.nl/en/news/2019/11/67537/keuzegids-university-of-twente-best-technical-university-in-the-netherlands-six-top-rated-bachelor-programmes

Digital Marketing topics according to Google Scholar: Nanotechnology in dentistry, cancer stem cells and Photocatalytic Degradation of Pollutants

Like most researchers, I look sometimes how my research work performs versus the work of fellow researchers in the field. Google Scholar offers an easy to use tool for this purpose: it allows you to see the number of citations of your scientific articles per year and in total, the number citations per article and your H-index. Metrics like citations and H-index are important indicators of scientific quality and research impact; they are also widely used, among other criteria, for promotions and recruiting of academic personnel.

While Google Scholar offers in principle a good service to academics, I  watch with frustration for some time already the rankings in my domain, namely Digital Marketing. The problem: next to well-known names in this field (like Prof. John Deighton from HBS and Prof Utpal Dholakia from Rice University) there are five persons on the 1^st page of the listing that are totally unknown to me (and to the rest of the researchers on Digital Marketing I suppose). A closer look at the publications of these high-cited individuals reveals that their publications are coming from totally unrelated fields like medicine and physics for example. Even a blogger appears to occupy a high position in the list with publications dating to 1993 when most probably this person was a toddler!

 Maybe a coincidence but all names in question seem to be common Indian names; this brings me to the conclusion that Google Scholar is adding-up all publications having as (co-)author someone with the same name no matter what the scientific field is, and places these persons in the list without their knowledge or intention but crediting them with publications that are not even theirs. In the Digital Marketing category, 4 of the top 5 in the list are such incorrect cases (at the time this blog was published)!!!

I think that the people who appear in these listings have done nothing wrong, Google is responsible for this error. Next to the very bad service to the academic community, the unreliable information in Google Scholar can create also problems in academic appraisals and recruitment.

I am not aware of the scale of the problem in other disciplines, but I think it is a shame that Google allows something like this to happen. With all the publicity around the unlimited possibilities of their algorithms, their AI technologies and the latest about the mastering of Quantum Computing I find it incredible that something so simple has escaped the attention of their algorithms or the curators of such results. I tried to inform them by contacting the Google Scholar help desk but no response after more than a month. Also, alerting an international newspaper (who found this extraordinary and promised to act) and a technology magazine did not bring any action on their part so far.

In my view, it would be easy for Google Scholar to avoid such errors by putting some of their smart algorithms to work, namely to identify such cases by simply scanning the content of the articles and decide whether articles about Nanotechnology in dentistry, cancer stem cells or Photocatalytic Degradation of Pollutants belong to the Digital Marketing domain. Also, in the case of common names, an extra control layer could place the various authors to the correct domains. check this using some of their technology but obviously, they do not do that, making their results reliable.

As I mentioned, I don’t know the extent of the problem so if other colleagues are aware of this situation in their domains can contact me. I also hope that Google maybe will read this post and take action

Call for the High Technology Small Firms Conference (HTSF) 2019 in the University of Twente

I’m pleased to share with you the call for papers of the High Technology Small Firms (HTSF) Conference that will be held at the University of Twente on 27-28 May 2019.

This year the HTSF Conference dedicates a special session on Consumer Behavior in Digitally Enabled Environments, organized by our UT research team working on the Digital Transformation and in particular the changing consumer behavior, and the identification of new approaches in comprehending and responding to the customer behavior change.

The special session focuses on unique, innovative and practically applicable research, practices and insights into the behavioral change of customers as consumers of products and services under the influence of the digital transformation. The impact of the digital transformation on customer behavior is visible in new forms of customer journeys, new types and sources of influence, new forms of marketing communication and new customer decision-making patterns.

The special session is in line with a number of issues shaping the research agenda of the Marketing, as these are specified in the Marketing Science Institute’s (MSI) research priorities for 2018-2020[1] under the umbrella topic Cultivating the Customer Asset.  In that respect, we welcome abstracts of papers related to topics like the following (indicative topics):

1. Characterizing and analyzing the Customer Journey along the purchase funnel

2. Investigating new roles of customers as networked customers and co-creators

3. Strategies to influence the customer journey

4. The Customer -Technology interface, bridging the gap of online and off-line

5. Macro-trends influencing Customer Decision Making

The methodology can be theoretical, empirical or drawing from the practice, especially drawing from entrepreneurship, marketing, strategy, sustainability, business, management, economics, and other social sciences, but transdisciplinary approaches are also encouraged.

Contributions from scholars, practitioners, and young researchers are welcome!

The deadline for abstract submissions is 15 March 2019 in the following link

https://www.utwente.nl/en/bms/nikos/events/HTSF2019/call-for-papers/special-session-5/

You can find the general and detailed information on the 2019  HTSF  Conference and the Call for Papers, at the UT HTSF Conference website.

Please, do not hesitate to contact me for any further information on the SBM special session, and apologies for any cross-posting.

I look forward to seeing you at the University of Twente next May.

Dr. Efthymios Constantinides

Assistant Professor Digital Marketing

Email:                         e.constantinides@utwente.nl

My Web Page:          https://people.utwente.nl/e.constantinides

Phone (work):            0031 – 534893799

Mobile:                      0031 6 48779153

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[1] http://www.msi.org/research/2018-2020-research-priorities/

The Customer Empowerment Fallacy: How Technology is Eroding the Customer Power

Do you remember who was the TIME magazine the 2006 Person of the Year? In case you don’t, it was you, me and all the people of the world who had access to the Net: armed with the Internet and the social media the customer seemed to have been able to change the market power game and be for the first in modern history on the market steering wheel (See link). Marketers baffled by the decreasing effectiveness of the traditional marketing communication and the time-honored persuasion tactics had no other choice but accept the fact that their full and undisputed control on the media and message was a thing of the past.

Praised as one of the major upshots of technology democratization, social networking, citizen journalism, and customer engagement, the customer empowerment became a major nightmare of the marketers forced to open their business to customer scrutiny and expose them to social media publicity disasters. The Customer Empowerment as a game changer was something I consistently would mention to my students at the very start of my Digital Marketing courses the last years: the smart, tech-savvy and networked customer was not anymore the weak link in the Marketing Equation.

Is the Customer Empowerment still the case? I am not sure at all and certainly, I have to think twice before I say this to my students again. The very technology that empowered the consumer during the last decade seems to work some time now again to the marketer's advantage. In fact, I have some bad news for the empowered consumer: Marketers armed with AI, immense computer power and zillions of bytes of customer data are quickly gaining the market upper hand. Customer profiling based on data trails consumers create online gives marketers new tools to create detailed customer profiles and predict as well as influence their behavior in ways we need to look at and discuss in more detail.

In the Market Power / Technology grid I attempt to describe how I look to this issue. The years in the timeline represent some in my view milestones of the marketing power journey.

http://www.nbcnews.com/id/16242528/ns/us_news-life/t/time-magazines-person-year-you/#.W_rn5WhKiM8

The Cambridge Analytica case: Old News

I am really surprised with the recent outburst of anger and frustration following revelations about the tactics of Cambridge Analytica in influencing the results of the American elections and the Brexit referendum with the possible tolerance of Facebook. 
This is in my view old news: In the winter of 2017 the case was already presented to my Bachelor students by SocialInc in a guest lecture and on June 2017 I discussed the Cambridge Analytica's case in a talk in June in the UT titled "Algorithmic Marketing".
I was surprised till 2 days ago that no one seemed to worry about this story that was also extensively discussed in various platforms, for example in the article in the Observer from May 2017, with a very graphic title (this article was also posted in our Smart Marketing Group Facebook group  on 23 October 2017).
Maybe when the mainstream media pick up a story and decide that the public is ripe to hear about it, the story reaches the increasingly passive, hypnotized public.
The question is what will happen from now on: Is this the beginning of the end of Facebook or even of the social media hype? Are there legal steps to be 

 taken against various over-jealous marketers and nerdy professors who sacrifice their intellectual capacities to profit? Will the wider public finally understand what is at stake here? And, last but not least, will the new EU GDPR put an end to these practices? Stay tuned!

What is the best time to buy an online airline ticket? The "6-week rule" (of thumb).

This is a question that keeps passengers and analysts/experts busy (https://fd.nl/werk-en-ge…/…/vliegen-het-kan-altijd-goedkoper), as much as the question how airlines price their seats considering the prices differences online customers encounter even on daily basis. The sometimes serious price differences even within the same day or between different people booking a rip at the same time have given food to urban legends and are often the source of customer frustration.
In 2011 the consumer advocacy program Tros Radar of the Dutch TV https://radar.avrotros.nl/uitzendingen/gemist/10-05-2011/vliegtickets/ asked me to help them find out if customer profiling by airlines using cookies was the reason for these differences. In the specific setting that we conducted the experiment at that time, we did not find any evidence of profiling. The conclusion was that the prices differences in online prices for the flights and the period we controlled were the result of capacity management algorithms. The findings were reported in my blog post of 11 March 2011 http://bit.ly/2HsAuOe
The question remains of course and is always timely: what is the cheapest time to book an online ticket? There are several studies in this, mostly by travel organizations or commercial parties. An older study (2012) http://business.time.com/…/study-the-best-time-to-buy-chea…/ and a more recent one (2017) https://nitravelnews.com/…/book-six-weeks-before-you-fly-f…/ agree that six weeks before departure is the best time to book an online ticket. Interestingly I did a small scale study covering a period of 2 months before departure for a return flight Amsterdam - Athens. I followed with Google Flights the prices of 3 airlines flying directly this route and the results were quite similar to the studies I mentioned: In this case, the lowest average price of the 3 companies (KLM, Aegean Airlines, and Transavia) was offered exactly 6 weeks before departure (42 days before departure). On the other hand, the cheapest price for Transavia over the whole period (119 Euro) and for Aegean Air (152 Euro) were noticed 60 days before departure while the cheapest price for KLM (170 Euro) was noticed for 4 times in a period between 40 and 45 days before departure. There are more interesting things to see in the ticket price development (see graphs) until the departure date.
It looks that the six-week rule holds some truth, Interestingly though, next to our 2011 study (that as a scientific article was accepted only by a conference) there is still no academic research on this issue. Maybe one of our next research projects for more scientific evidence on what is the best day to book a fight and how the algorithms of the airline capacity management work.

Introduction to Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

Today our Bachelor students following our Module Digital Marketing in our International Business Administration studies were introduced to the Search Engine Marketing by the Team Nijhuis, one of the top Google partners in Europe.
The guest lecture was in the context of the UT AdWords Challenge project, a group assignment introducing the students to the world of online marketing

CALL FOR BUSINESSES AND ORGANIZATIONS BASED IN THE NETHERLANDS AND GERMANY

Interested in an AdWords campaign in partnership with one of our student groups? We look for partner companies in the UT / Saxion AdWords online Challenge.

During the last 3 years, our Bachelor students of the course @Digital Marketing for Networked Businesses in the University of Twente have participated in the Google Online Marketing Challenge, a worldwide college competition introducing students to the topic of Search Engine Advertising (SEA).

After ten years of organizing this annual challenge, Google stopped this project this year. Given the importance of SEA for the modern Digital Marketing education, we developed a new assignment in the @UT in cooperation with the EIT Digital and the Saxion University of Applied Sciences. The new challenge is quite similar to the Google Challenge but since a free-of-charge AdWords campaign and the organization are not available anymore by Google, we ask the participating partner companies a contribution covering the campaign and some of the organizational costs. 
Partner companies can count on a motivated group of students who under the supervision of our staff and external experts will develop and execute a 3-week AdWords campaign, will conduct an audit of the company website and will report the results of the project to the partner company. More details and registration form are available at the link: Registration UT AdWords Challenge

AMAZON: a Leader and Disrupter of Retail

No doubt that Amazon has seriously impacted on and transformed retail and online shopping in general for more than 20 years. I follow this company since the 90s and I was one of those wondering if Amazon would survive the dot.com disaster of the beginning of the 20th century. They indeed survived it based on a strategy of (mainly) diversification as I described in my 2004 article "Strategies for surviving the Internet meltdown: The case of two Internet incumbents". They still go strong and keep disrupting, if not always without controversy: see the Black Friday strikes of Amazon personnel in Europe. 

Digital pains: Is (mis)use of algorithms a threat to democracy?

A must-read article of the Guardian. Everyone can draw his / her own conclusions

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/07/the-great-british-brexit-robbery-hijacked-democracy

Master Class Behavioral Targeting in the University of Twente II

The presentations of the speakers in the Master Class Behavioral Targeting are available in the following link
https://www.utwente.nl/en/bms/nikos/education/masterclass-behavioral-targeting/#introduction

Master Class Behavioral Targeting in the University of Twente

Our Master Class Behavioral Targeting of October 2, 2017 in the Gallery Building in the Campus of the the University of Twente was very successful according to the comments we received from the participants. A lot of interest by students, educators and practitioners, very interesting presentations and a very lively panel discussion. Our thanks to all participants and contributors.

The presentations will be soon available online. Requests to e.constantinides@utweente.nl
Videos of the session are posted in our smart Marketing Facebook group Smart Marketing Facebook group

A popular article on Web Experience

Glad to see that my 2004 article Influencing the Online Consumer's behavior: The Web Experience published in the Internet Research Journal is still among the top-5 most read papers
http://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/full/10.1108/10662240410530835