PhD projects

in Marketing Management


The marketing group at Rotterdam School of Management (RSM) ranks among the best in the world. Our members publish their research in top journals in marketing as well as related fields. They deeply care about open science practices (e.g., data sharing and open-source software), and frequently host seminars to encourage knowledge exchange. The group is diverse (in terms of research interests and cultural background), collaborative, and collegial.

Our faculty members are able to supervise PhD students on a broad range of topics, typically divided in three sub-domains: Marketing Science, Consumer Behaviour, or Consumer Neuroscience.

Regardless of the specific topic, the department sees a lot of value in supervising students who would like to leverage their work experience (e.g., from their current profession) to collect practically relevant data and/or conduct (field) experiments that can provide the empirical basis for their PhD project.

The PhD student will work in close collaboration with the supervisory team on:

  • Digital transformation in marketing
  • Consumer policy
  • Machine learning
  • Predictive modelling
  • Performance assessment
  • Variable selection
  • Segmentation
  • Consumer judgment and decision making
  • Technology and consumer behaviour
  • The Psychology of AI (some of our faculty are members of the AI lab, please see here for further info
  • Identifying novel research questions based on real-world phenomena and extant theory
  • Understanding the theoretical foundations and prior literature relevant to understanding the phenomena
  • Identifying the fundamental variables and relationships that are most important to studying the phenomena, and formalizing them in a measurement model or set of experimental hypotheses
  • Gathering experimental or observational data to test hypotheses or measure phenomena
  • Identifying the critical assumptions needed to draw inferences from empirical results
  • Writing computer code to analyse experimental or secondary data
  • Presenting research findings at international conferences
  • Writing up findings for publication in international journals
  • Participating in and contributing to departmental research functions (PhD Day, research seminars, weekly research meetings)