Thorsten Hennig-Thurau

Prof. Dr. Thorsten Hennig-Thurau holds the Chair for Marketing & Media Research at the University of Münster’s prestigious Marketing Center and serves as the academic director of the university’s M.B.A. in Marketing program. Prior to joining the University of Münster in 2010, he was a professor at the Bauhaus University of Weimar. From 2005 to 2014, he also served as a part-time Research Professor of Marketing at City University London’s Cass Business School. Leading German newspapers F.A.Z. and Handelsblatt have repeatedly ranked him as one of the top German business/economics scholars.

Professor Hennig-Thurau’s academic work focuses on the consequences of digitalization and social media in particular for businesses and consumers; his work on how digitalization affects and challenges the practices and theory of the firm goes back to the Internet’s early days. Professor Hennig-Thurau also is an expert in the field of entertainment and media marketing and economics. His research has been published several times by the world’s leading scholarly journals such as the Journal of Marketing (in which he had eight articles since 2006), the Academy of Management Journal, and Journal of Applied Psychology. His work has been highly influential, as reflected by more than 22,000 citations according to Google scholar. His work has been covered frequently by leading international media outlets, including America’s New York Times and Businessweek, Britain’s Financial Times, as well as by all of Germany’s prestigious newspapers and magazines. Professor Hennig-Thurau has also published several books; he recently authored “Entertainment Science,” a 900+ pages book that shows how combining intuition with data analytics and practical theory enhances the performance of those who produce and distribute entertainment (with Mark B. Houston, Springer Nature 2019 — http://entertainment-science.com).

Professor Hennig-Thurau has been honored with numerous awards, including a Lifetime Award for Published Scholarly Contributions from the UCLA and the JAMS Sheth Foundation Best Paper Award in both 2015 and 2018. The Handelsblatt has listed him as one of the top 1% of business professors in German-speaking countries in terms of productivity, and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung has awarded him as one of Germany’s ten most influential economists. Professor Hennig-Thurau has been president of marketing professors in Germany, the first European member of the Academic Council of the American Marketing Association, the director of the Digitalization Think:Lab (a joint initiative with Roland Berger Strategy Consultants at the forefront of the digital revolution), and was a founder of the highly impactful JOURQUAL ranking of academic journals (which he also co-edited for more than 15 years).

Professor Hennig-Thurau is a proud member of the multi-million Euro DFG Research Unit on social media, the first of its kind in the field of marketing. He has (co-)chaired several high-profile events, including the AMA’s Winter Marketing Academic Conference in Las Vegas, the Big Data, Big Movies Conference in Berlin in 2016, and the 2018 Mallen Filmed Entertainment Economics Conference