Gokhan Yildirim

Summary

Dr. Gokhan Yildirim is Assistant Professor of Marketing at Imperial College Business School. Prior to joining Imperial College, he was Assistant Professor of Marketing Analytics at Lancaster University, UK. His research interests lie primarily in the domain of return on marketing investment. In particular, his research examines strategic marketing problems such as long-term effectiveness of digital and non-digital marketing efforts, marketing resource allocation in cross-channel environments, and linking consumer mindset metrics to financial performance. He uses applied time-series econometrics and dynamic programming tools to offer real-life useful marketing insights on these topics.

His most recent research deals with the digital marketing. One area of his work in digital marketing examines the effectiveness of digital advertising channels, including earned media (e.g. Facebook, Twitter), paid media (e.g. banner ads), and owned media (e.g. websites) for familiar versus unfamiliar brands. Another area of his research in online marketing investigates the consumers'' sensitivities to price, and user ratings of the mobile apps across different cultures. This work provides guidance to mobile app marketers to predict the impact of prices and user ratings in different regions of the world.  

His research into consumer mindset metrics looks at how marketing actions can influence the customers’ hearts and minds, which would make long-lasting gains in profitability in the future. This line of work provides a managerial guidance on how a better understanding of the connection between marketing actions, consumer attitudinal metrics, and sales outcomes can be translated into improved decisions on the marketing mix.

Gokhan’s work appeared in top tier journals of the field such as Marketing Science and International Journal of Research in Marketing. His article on consumer attitudinal metrics (Marketing Science, 2014) was selected as the finalist for Robert D. Buzzel Best Paper Award. His academic work also appeared in the major conferences of the field such as Theory and Practice in Marketing (TPM), INFORMS Marketing Science, Marketing Dynamics and EMAC.

His research has been sponsored by several research grants from Wharton Customer Analytics Initiative (WCAI), Marketing Science Institute, AiMark, and Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation. With his co-authors, he was the grant recipient for the Marketing Science Institute Research Competition on “Communication and Branding in a Digital Era".

He received his Ph.D. in Business Administration and Quantitative Methods with a major in Marketing from Carlos III University, Madrid. He holds a B.A. degree in Business Administration from Marmara University, Istanbul, Turkey.

Previously, Gokhan taught E-Marketing, Marketing Research Methods, Forecasting, and Business Analytics courses at undergraduate and graduate levels. At Imperial, Gokhan teaches on the executive MBA and Msc Strategic Marketing programs.