This seminar is designed as a central platform for academic discussions and knowledge exchange among doctoral students and faculty members at the Department of Marketing. The course is closely linked to the Marketing Department’s Research Seminar Series.To take full advantage of the faculty expertise offered at WU's Marketing Department, all students supervised or advised by Professors Reutterer and Schreier are expected to attend all the seminars in the Research Seminar Series.

Seminar speakers’ schedules typically include a meeting with doctoral students and the option for reserving indivdual time slots with our visitors; students are expected to take advantage of these opportunities to interact with visiting scholars and to learn about the field as a whole.

In addition to the networking possibilities, this seminar aims to keep doctoral students updated with fresh research results and recent developments in the academic marketing community. By reflecting these from the perspective of their own research projects students are enabled to receive early feedback, to gain new insights, and/or to acquirenew research ideas. Students should also be enabled to translate originalresearch, which is not necessarily within the core focus of their own projects,into research questions and to discuss them.

The doctoral students should read digest the paper(s) presented in the Research Seminar and additionally assigned papers (if any) before the seminar. These papers typically focus a research area of our presenter's expertise. In addition of being prepared to actively discuss this research, each student is asked to build from these assigned readings to create research questions and to discuss these them in class.

Students are asked to submit a reflection paper for each presenter's talk and the corresponding PhD session. Each of these two reflection papers should be around 1.5 to 2 pages long and summarize your key take-aways, learnings, open issues, implications for your own work, etc. The papers are due one week after the sessions and need to be sent to michaela.weissenbeck@wu.ac.at.

The seminar will be held in a collaborative, open and friendly atmosphere. In respect to this philosophy, participants are required to attend the entire seminar.

Students will be assessed based on class contributions (30%), the set of reflection papers (30%), and a term paper (40%). For positive evaluation a minimum of 80 percent of the classes (including seminar presentations and PhD sessions) need to be attended.