Dr. Jochen Hartmann wins Wissenschaftspreis 2022

Dr. Jochen Hartmann, assistant professor at the Faculty of Economics and Business, was awarded the Wissenschaftspreis 2022 (Science Award) for his dissertation.

The EHI Retail Institute and GS1 Germany, the initiators of the Wissenschaftspreis, yearly award prizes to startups, cooperative projects (between universities, businesses and the industry) and academic projects that aim to offer retail companies solutions to different challenges. This year, the advisory board and jury honored projects focused on digital twins, the social media data jungle and data-driven experience management. The dissertation award is endowed with 10,000 euros and recognizes cutting-edge research that aims to bridge academia and practice.

Hartmann’s award-winning dissertation titled ‘Machine Learning Methods for Data-Driven Marketing’ recognizes that the image of retail companies is no longer defined by advertising and corporate communication alone - via social media, customers now help shape the image of a company. Yet, an estimate of 80-95 percent of all data available to companies is unstructured. With deep learning, this wealth of unstructured data has been made accessible in the form of texts and images. In his dissertation, Dr. Jochen Hartmann - who did his postdoctoral training at the University of Hamburg and joined the University of Groningen at the beginning of 2022 - shows how variables can be automatically extracted from text and image data in order to enable new insights for marketing. All three essays from his dissertation are published in leading marketing journals (1x Journal of Marketing Research, 2x International Journal of Research in Marketing). Overall, his research results give an innovative, novel overview of text and image analysis and impressively illustrate the potential of the new deep learning technologies to glean insights from these unstructured data.

For more information, please contact Jochen Hartmann.