PhD Grant in Digital Marketing

Research project summary

The connected world in which we live has fundamentally changed our behaviours throughout the customer journey, including the way we search for information, purchase, and interact with organizations. In this digitized omnichannel context, understanding and managing the experience of consumers, employees and other stakeholders has become a major challenge for organizations. This project aims to advance knowledge on this subject and, ultimately, to help organizations have a more sustainable social, environmental and economic impact.

Among the numerous topics related to digital marketing and the management of stakeholder experience, we identify a few that are related to the research currently being carried out within the CCMS and which could be the subject of a doctoral thesis: Understanding stakeholder experience in a virtual environment, its value, experience in multi-channel hybrid environments (e.g., mobile, website, social networks, etc.), the concept of social presence, but also the important part of affective reactions and their impact on experience in a digital context.

Understanding and optimizing interactions between machines/robots/artificial intelligence (AI) and humans for enhanced engagement and trust (e.g., use of chatbots for complaint management). This raises many questions about, among other things: the ability of AI to understand and consider stakeholders’ emotions and needs; the way service tasks should be designed such that hybrid human-AI teams can co-create value; the conditions necessary for the replacement of humans by AI; the role of humans and AI along the journey.

The development of a conceptual framework for studying consumer behaviour in the digital world, which would serve as a scientific anchor and allow the development and optimization of digital marketing actions as well as novel and relevant performance indicators.