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 and Study Days.To take full advantage of the faculty expertise offered at WU's Marketing Department, all doctoral/PhD students in marketing are expected to attend all the seminars in the Research Seminar Series.

The speakers’ schedules typically include a meeting with doctoral students and the option for reserving individual 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 acquire new research ideas. Students should also be enabled to translate original research, which is not necessarily within the core focus of their own projects, into research questions and to discuss them.

This course benefits from the chance to engage with different scholars and obtain additional perspectives. A minimum of 80% attendance is hence expected.

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 christian.spadt@wu.ac.at.

The term paper is around 10 to 15 pages long and documents the current status of students' own research projects. It includes a motivation section including research questions, the positioning of the project against prior relevant literature, the (planned) empirical approach, expected findings and a brief reflection on the implications of visiting the seminar for the own work. The term paper is due two weeks after the last seminar session and need to be sent to christian.spadt@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.

For this course we have the following scale:

• < 60%                               fail (5)
• 60% bis 69,99%               sufficient (4)
• 70% bis 79,99%               satisfactory (3)
• 80% bis 89,99%               good (2)
• >= 90%                             excellent (1)

PLEASE NOTE: In order to be able to attend and complete the course, students must be supervised by one of the Marketing Department's professors. In order to formally register for the course, please email christian.spadt@wu.ac.at by the end of September (fall semester) / February (spring semester).