Prof. Dr. Sönke Albers is Distinguished Research Professor of Marketing and Innovation at Kühne Logistics University (KLU). From 2010 to 2016, he served as Dean of Research at KLU, where he focused on faculty development and making KLU a research-oriented, internationally competitive university.
Before joining KLU, he was a Professor of Marketing at WHU and the University of Lüneburg. He spent over 20 years as Professor of Innovation, New Media, and Marketing at Christian-Albrechts-University at Kiel. He holds a doctorate in Operations Research from the University of Hamburg and an honorary doctorate from Goethe University Frankfurt.
Prof. Albers has been a Rector at WHU and Dean at the School of Business Administration, Economics, and Social Sciences at Kiel. He was a Fellow and Dean of the European Marketing Academy and served as President of the German Academic Association for Business Research. Additionally, he is a member of the Academy of Sciences in Hamburg. He has mentored 30 professors, including 12 who are now professors at various universities. His research focuses on marketing planning, sales management, and the diffusion of innovations. He has published around 150 articles and 15 books. In 2009, he was ranked 7th in publication productivity by Handelsblatt. He received the 2011 EMAC Distinguished Marketing Scholar Award and the 2009-2010 INFORMS MSI Practice Prize. Recently, he was honored with the 2020 Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Marketing Association.
Up Close & Personal
To protect your data, a connection to YouTube/Vimeo is only established after you click on the play button. When the video is loaded, data is transferred to the YouTube/Vimeo servers. Further information in the Privacy Policy.
“My conclusion after working at KLU for ten years is that it is a top quality university, with highly motivated and highly performing professors. It has students coming from all over the world that are also highly motivated and want to achieve something special and it has impact on companies by executive education and consulting projects.”
– Prof. Dr. h.c. Sönke Albers
Teaching
- Marketing Planning & Strategy
- Salesforce Management
- Marketing Performance Measurement
- Diffusion of Innovations
- Quantitative Methods in Marketing Research
Research Areas
- Corporate Social Responsibility
- Customer Management
- Decision Support Systems
- Marketing Budgeting (Allocation of Resources)
- Marketing Performance Management
- Measurement of Sales Response to Marketing Activities
- Measurement of the Monetary Impact of Marketing Activities
- Salesforce Management
Selected Publications
To optimally set marketing communication (“marcom”) budgets, reliable estimates of short-term elasticities and carryover effects are required. Empirical generalizations from meta-analyses of prior field studies can help guide these decisions. However, the last such meta-analysis of marcom carryover effects was performed on Koyck model–based estimates collected before 1984 and was confined to mass media advertising. The authors update and extend extant empirical generalizations via two meta-analyses of carryover estimates compiled from studies encompassing personal selling, targeted advertising, and mass media advertising, using diverse model forms, until 2015. The first is focused on and utilizes 918 estimates of the carryover proportion of the total effect, termed long-term share of the total effect, and the second focuses on 863 derivable estimates of 90% implied duration intervals. The authors find the mean long-term shares of the total effect for personal selling (.687) and targeted advertising (.650) are distinctly larger than that for mass media advertising (.523) and the corresponding median 90% implied duration intervals are 12.6, 2, and 3.4 months, respectively. The authors conclude by discussing differences by model type and the implications for marcom budget-setting and analyses.
Previous research on marketing budget decisions has shown that profit improvement from better allocation across products or regions is much higher than from improving the overall budget. However, despite its high managerial relevance, contributions by marketing scholars are rare.
In this paper, we introduce an innovative and feasible solution to the dynamic marketing budget allocation problem for multiproduct, multicountry firms. Specifically, our decision support model allows determining near-optimal marketing budgets at the country--product--marketing--activity level in an Excel-supported environment each year. The model accounts for marketing dynamics and a product's growth potential as well as for trade-offs with respect to marketing effectiveness and profit contribution. The model has been successfully implemented at Bayer, one the world's largest pharmaceutical and chemical firms. The profit improvement potential is more than 50% and worth nearly €500 million in incremental discounted cash flows.
This article presents a meta-analysis of prior econometric estimates of personal selling elasticity—that is, the ratio of the percentage change in an objective, ratio-scaled measure of sales output (e.g., dollar or unit purchases) to the corresponding percentage change in an objective, ratio-scaled measure of personal selling input (e.g., dollar expenditures). The authors conduct a meta-analysis of 506 personal selling elasticity estimates drawn from analyses of 88 empirical data sets across 75 previous articles. They find a mean estimate of current-period personal selling elasticity of .34. They also find that elasticity estimates are higher for early life-cycle-stage offerings, higher from studies set in Europe than from those set in the United States, and smaller in more recent years. In addition, elasticity estimates are affected significantly by analysts' use of relative rather than absolute sales output measures, by cross-sectional rather than panel data, by omission of promotions, by lagged effects, by marketing interaction effects, and by the neglect of endogeneity in model estimation. The method bias–corrected mean personal selling elasticity is approximately .31. The authors discuss the implications of their results for sales managers and researchers.
The authors analyze primary demand effects of marketing efforts directed at the physician (detailing and professional journal advertising) versus marketing efforts directed at the patient (direct-to-consumer advertising). The analysis covers 86 categories, or approximately 85% of the U.S. pharmaceutical market, during the 2001–2005 period. Primary demand effects are rather small, in contrast with the estimated sales effects for individual brands. By using a new brand-level method to estimate primary demand effects with aggregate data, the authors show that the small effects are due to intense competitive interactions during the observation period but not necessarily to low primary demand responsiveness. In contrast with previous studies, the authors also find that detailing is more effective in driving primary demand than direct-to-consumer advertising. A category sales model cannot provide such insights. In addition, a category sales model likely produces biased predictions about period-by-period changes in primary demand. The suggested brand-level method does not suffer from these limitations.
Academic Positions
| since 2024 | Distinguished Research Professor of Marketing and Innovation, Kühne Logistics University, Hamburg, Germany |
|---|---|
| 2010 - 2024 | Professor of Marketing and Innovation, Kühne Logistics University, Hamburg, Germany |
| 2010 - 2016 | Dean of Research, Kühne Logistics University, Hamburg, Germany |
| 2006 and 2009 | Visiting Scholar, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia |
| since 2005 | Member of the Academy of Science in Hamburg |
| 2005 | Visiting Scholar, Pennsylvania State University, Smeal College of Business Administration, Pennsylvania, United States |
| 2002 and 2006 | Visiting Scholar at the Australian Graduate School of Management in Sydney, Australia |
| 1999/01 | Dean of the School of Business, Economics, and Social Sciences of Christian-Albrechts-University Kiel, Germany |
| 1999 | Professor of Innovation, New Media and Marketing, Christian-Albrechts-University Kiel, Germany |
| 1993/94 | Visiting Professor of Marketing, University of Würzburg, Germany |
| 1990 | Professor of Marketing and Management Science, Christian-Albrechts-University Kiel, Germany |
| 1989 | Visiting Professor of Marketing at INSEAD, Fontainebleau, France |
| 1986 | Professor of Marketing and Management Science, University of Lüneburg, Germany |
| 1985 | Dean of the Koblenz School of Corporate Management (WHU), Koblenz, Germany |
| 1984 | Professor of Marketing and Management Science, Koblenz School of Corporate Management (WHU), Koblenz, Germany |
| 1982/83 | Visiting Assistant Professor of Finance, University of Siegen, Germany |
| 1982 | Habilitation for Business Administration, University of Kiel with a thesis on "Decision support for personal selling", Kiel, Germany |
| 1981 | Assistant Professor of Marketing and Management Science, Department of Business Administration, Christian-Albrechts-University Kiel, Germany |
| 1980/81 | Visiting Research Scholar, Graduate School of Business of Stanford University (associated with Prof. Dr. V. Srinivasan), Stanford, United States |
| 1977 | Assistant Professor of Marketing and Management Science, Department of Business Administration, Christian-Albrechts-University Kiel, Germany |
| 1974 | Teaching and research assistant at the Department of Business Administration, Christian-Albrechts-University Kiel (Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Klaus Brockhoff), Kiel, Germany |
Education
| 1977 | Doctoral Degree (Dr. rer. pol., equivalent to a Ph.D.) from the University of Hamburg with a dissertation on "Airline Crew Scheduling" (advisor: Prof. Horst Seelbach), Hamburg, Germany |
|---|---|
| 1973 | Diploma in Business Administration from University of Hamburg, Germany Internships with the companies AG Weser (Shipyard), Grünhut (Shipping Agency), Kühne (Food Manufacturer), Krupp Atlas Elektronik GmbH (Electonics Manufacturer), all of them in Bremen, computer programmer with Harder, Meiser & Co. (Fruit Distributor), Bremen, Summer student associate with IBM Deutschland GmbH |
2025 - Outstanding Editorial Review Board Member
Sönke Albers was regogniozed as Outstanding Editorial Board Member of International Journal of Research in Marketing (IJRM).
2020 - The European Marketing Academy (EMAC) has elected Professor Dr. Dr. h.c. Sönke Albers as Dean of Fellows 2020-2022.
Sönke Albers thus serves as the spokesman for the twenty-five fellows for special merits.
2020 - The American Marketing Association’s (AMA) Selling & Sales Management Special Interest Group is delighted to announce that Sönke Albers is the winner of the 2020 Lifetime Achievement Award!
In the field of sales management and personal sales, this is the highest award. The American Marketing Association is the world´s leading scientific association in the field of marketing and publishes top journals like the Journal of Marketing and the Journal of Marketing Research.
2015 - Honorary Membership of German Academic Association of Business Research
Sönke Albers has been elected as honorary member of the German Academic Association of Business Research (VHB: Verband der Hochschullehrer für Betriebswirtschaft) which comprises almost all 2200 professors and researchers in business in Germany, Austria, Liechtenstein, and the German-speaking part of Switzerland. Such an honorary membership is given to members that have shown excellence in research and provided important services to the community. Sönke Albers was member of the advisory board of VHB, chairman of the commission marketing, editor-in-chief of the scientific journal “Business Research” of the association, and chairman of VHB 2007-2008.
2011 - EMAC Distinguished Marketing Scholar Award
Sönke Albers has been selected to receive the 2011 EMAC Distinguished Marketing Scholar Award. The award marks the highest honor that a marketing scholar in Europe can receive and recognizes Sönke Albers' extensive and impactful research publications as well as his outstanding contributions to the European Marketing Academy (EMAC), the largest association of marketing scholars in Europe.
2010 - INFORMS Society for Marketing Science MSI Practice Prize
Sönke Albers has won together with Marc Fischer the 2009-2010 INFORMS Society for Marketing Science MSI Practice Prize. The prize was awarded for outstanding development and implementation of marketing science concepts and methods. The paper is entitled, “Dynamic Marketing Budget Allocation across Countries, Products, and Marketing Activities.” The winning research provides an innovative solution to what is called “the dynamic marketing allocation budget problem” for multi-product, multi-country firms at Bayer, Inc. The decision-support model allows Bayer to determine annual marketing budgets at the country-product-activity level in a Microsoft Excel-supported environment. The model takes into account marketing dynamics and a product’s growth potential, as well as tradeoffs of marketing effectiveness and profit contribution. The research for Bayer has realized benefits and savings of hundreds of millions.
Further information and a video of the presentation is available here
2005 - Honorary doctorate from Johann Wolfgang Goethe University at Frankfurt/Main
Sönke Albers has received in 2005 an honorary doctorate from Johann Wolfgang Goethe University at Frankfurt/Main. Goethe University honors his contributions to make marketing effects better quantifiable. He has not only published his research in national as well international journals but also implemented his research in several companies. He has been very successful in educating numerous academic students who are now professors.
2004 - Best paper award of the International Journal of Research in Marketing
Sönke Albers received the best paper award of the International Journal of Research in Marketing for his article (together with Manfred Krafft and Rajiv Lal) “Relative explanatory power of agency theory and transaction cost analysis in German Salesforces”, in: International Journal of Research in Marketing, Vol. 21 (2004), 265-283. Link to article
