Marketing Strategy and Innovation

The team investigates how firms and platforms structure and manage innovation processes, and how governance mechanisms shape participation, creativity, and value creation. This work examines how organizations balance openness with control, design effective rules and architectures, and manage contributor incentives and safeguards in distributed innovation settings such as crowdsourcing contests and digital platforms. A key focus is understanding which governance choices sustain contribution and high-quality innovation outcomes, and how complementors—not only platform owners—can influence governance changes. The team also studies how organizational learning shapes firms’ capacity to innovate. This research generates insights that help organizations design innovation processes and platform rules that attract contributors while protecting the integrity of what they create together.

The team investigates how firms generate, evaluate, and champion new ideas, and successfully bring innovations to market. This work examines idea screening and decision-making in the early stages of innovation, customer integration in new product development, the role of a proactive market orientation in creating new markets, and the diffusion and adoption of radical innovations among customers and competitors. A related stream uses game theory to study product introduction strategies—the timing, sequencing, and pricing of new products—and strategic entry into emerging and nascent markets, where demand, technologies, and competitive rules are still taking shape. The team’s research aims to help firms improve the quality of their innovation decisions and increase the commercial success of their new products and services.

Related project: ANR Metavation — co-evolution of nascent markets in extended reality

The team investigates how firms design and leverage customer engagement architectures, digital touchpoint strategies, and data-driven decision systems to shape market outcomes, including intra- and inter-platform competition. This research focuses on strategic levers—such as freemium models, platform design, omnichannel interactions, and social commerce—that influence customer actions and drive long-term value creation across digital ecosystems. The team runs large-scale field experiments with digital firms on topics such as freemium games and services, mobile apps, e-mail marketing, influencer marketing, and corporate social marketing campaigns. The team also studies how firms drive innovation and transformation through digital technologies, artificial intelligence, and strategic marketing capabilities, while integrating sustainability and long-term value creation. This work examines how organizations adapt to technological, environmental, and market change to remain competitive in dynamic environments, and generates insights to help firms design effective and responsible digital strategies.

The team studies the links between customer orientation, customer experience, satisfaction, loyalty, and profitability. This work examines the Experience-Profit Chain, including the nature—and in particular the asymmetry—of the relationships between its components, to understand which investments in customer experience actually translate into financial performance. The team also investigates customer engagement strategies, brand activism, complaint management, and customer lifetime value management, and seeks to optimize marketing interventions along all interaction points of the customer journey. This research aims to provide managers with evidence-based tools to build customer-oriented organizations and to allocate resources where they create the most value for customers and for the firm.

The team analyzes buyer–seller interactions, sales management, sales force incentives, and negotiation, with a particular focus on complex and business-to-business environments. This work examines how service strategies and digital and interpersonal touchpoints shape the relationships between firms and their customers, and how salespeople and sales organizations build, maintain, and repair these relationships over time. The team also studies business development and relationship marketing practices that support long-term value creation. This research generates actionable insights for sales and service organizations seeking to manage their market relationships more effectively.

ANR (National Research Agency in France) research project on “Metavation – Activities, challenges, and performance in the co-evolution of nascent markets” (ANR-23-CE26-0014, €319K, 2024–2027), coordinated by Fiona Schweitzer, in collaboration with the University of St. Gallen. The project explores how companies navigate opportunities and challenges in the emerging extended reality (XR) market and how they create value for customers, stakeholders, and society.

ANR Metavation

GEM’s institute dedicated to customer satisfaction, loyalty, and the Experience-Profit Chain, directed by Daniel Ray. The institute brings together the team’s research on customer orientation and the links between customer experience and financial performance, and translates it into measurement tools and management practices for companies. It conducts research contracts and collaborative projects with firms such as Orange, Renault, EDF, and Malakoff Humanis, on topics including satisfaction and complaint management, customer loyalty, and the development of a customer culture.