Faculty, postdoctoral and doctoral reseachers

Jaakko Aspara
Professor

Jaakko's research focuses on strategic marketing and management, including innovations and new business models; marketing-finance interface; brand management; field experiments with digital services; and consumers' financial decision-making. More about Jaakko

Peter Björk
Professor

Peter's research focus is in the field of service marketing, consumer behavior, tourism marketing and destination development. He has a special interest in service innovation and design, destination branding, tourist experiences and attraction marketing. Björk is associate editor for Scandinavian Journal of Hospitality and Tourism, and Finnish Journal of Tourism Research, and a board member of the Finnish University Network for Tourism Studies (FUNTS). More about Peter

Robert Ciuchita
Assistant Professor

Robert is passionate about and intrigued by service innovation. His research revolves around consumer learning from technology-empowered interactions and consumer (dis)engagement with service innovation with a focus on digital services such as mobile payment, multiplayer video games and online socialization platforms. More about Robert

Johanna Frösén
Associate Professor

Johanna’s research focuses on strategic marketing, including topics such as marketing performance and control, marketing metrics and analytics, strategic orientations and organizational climate, and market-based capabilities. She has a broad interest towards both qualitative and quantitative research methods. More about Johanna

Christian Grönroos
Professor Emeritus

Professor Emeritus Christian Grönroos' research focuses mainly on three areas: the nature of a service-centered perspective on business and marketing (service logic), reinventing marketing through promise management, and transforming manufacturing into service business. He has recently published a series of short video lectures on "Principles of service management" on YouTube. More about Christian

Johanna Gummerus
Associate Professor

Johanna's research interests are wide, and include consumer service experiences, service innovation and social media marketing. She is also interested in how value is created, destructed and assessed by different parties. She finished her Ph.D. thesis in 2011 on the topic "Customer value in e-service: Conceptual foundation and empirical evidence". More about Johanna

Kristina Heinonen
Professor

Kristina is interested in service value, e-service and mobile service, dynamics of customer relationships, and integrated marketing communication. More about Kristina

Maria Holmlund-Rytkönen
Professor

Maria's primary research focuses on service and customer-oriented management in business-to-business markets including the following topics: - Mental models in business and the relevance of marketing in companies. - Relationship dynamics: Initiation of business-to-business relationships, and Relationship ending. - Service transition and services in an industrial setting. More about Maria

Veronica Liljander
Professor

Veronica is currently involved in studying storytelling and its impact on service marketing, as well as on consumers in general. More about Veronica

Anu Norrgrann
Assistant Professor

Anu is particularly interested in research themes with symbols and meanings in focus. Her research topics are linked to both business to business and consumer contexts, examining for instance brands as resources in business networks, and the home as a context of consumption. Her work has also focused on the retail setting. Anu also has a special interest in (auto)ethnography as a research method. More about Anu

Pia Polsa
Associate Professor

Pia's research includes cross-national service quality, power and relationships in marketing channels and retailing, business models in emerging markets, and crystallization in business methodology. Pia's empirical research settings are cross-national and comparative, emerging and poor markets, and non-profit organizations like health care. Pia has worked with both ethnographic and quantitative data from Finland, US, Poland, China, India, Nigeria, and Netherlands. More about Pia

Annika Ravald
Associate Professor

Annika's research follows an inductive approach, focusing mainly on basic research aiming at conceptual theory development. Ravald fancies strategic marketing issues, such as business logics and models; market, network, relationship and service dynamics; navigation in emerging business landscapes; and the dynamics of value creation in various types of constellations. Her publications can be found in for instance Journal of Service Research, Journal of Business Research, Industrial Marketing Management, Journal of Service Management and European Journal of Marketing. More about Annika

Anne Rindell
Associate Professor

Anne Rindell is Associate Professor and Docent at CERS Hanken. Anne's research focuses primarily on branding, corporate heritage and image management. Her special interest is the consumer and customer perspective. She also does research on arts management and service innovation.More about Anne

Tore Strandvik
Professor Emeritus

Research on service, relationships and marketing communication both within the field of B-to-C and B-to-B. More about Tore

Paul Viio
Assistant Professor

Paul's research focuses on value-based selling and sales management, and relationship-orientation of sales and purchasing in a business-to-business context. He has close to twenty years of B2B sales experience across Europe, earned his PhD degree from Hanken, and is interested in developing sales and business profitability in a sustainable manner. More about Paul

Henrik Virtanen
Assistant Professor

Henrik is interested in social media marketing and in dynamics of networks, relationships and coopetition within the field of B-to-B. The context for the research is often SMEs. More about Henrik

Dominik Mahr
Senior Fellow Researcher

His work integrates research, education and business practice of marketing, innovation, digitisation, strategy, services and design thinking. 

Stefanie Paluch
Senior Fellow Researcher

Her research and teaching is concerned with innovative topics such as risk and frustration with smart technologies in the B2B-context.

Magnus Söderlund
Senior Fellow Researcher

His current research interests comprise customer satisfaction, customer loyalty, and service encounters.

Per Kristensson
Senior Fellow Researcher

His research focuses on creativity, innovation, decision making, behavior change, service management and consumer psychology.

Åke Finne
Lecturer

Åke's research focuses on relationship communication: Integrated marketing communication (IMC), communication from a recipient perspective as well as silent communication. Åke is also interested in the relationship between visual advertisement and ethics from a gender perspective. More about Åke

Anu Helkkula
Affiliated Researcher

Anu's primary research interests include service and value experience, experience of value creating practices, co-creation of value, phenomenology, qualitative research methods and development of innovation practices. Before entering academia, she worked for 20 years in service management and development positions. More about Anu

Annamari Huovinen
CERS Coordinator

Annamari is interested in intersections of communication, culture, marketing, politics and identities. She has studied political advertising, critical consumer practices, urban place identities, visual representations in the media, and hate speech. More about Annamari

Christian Kowalkowski
Affiliated Researcher

Christian's research is concerned with service infusion in manufacturing firms; that is, how traditional goods-centric firms can navigate the transition to a service-savvy business model. He is also interested in service innovation, dynamics of value propositions, and solutions marketing. More about Christian

Gustav Medberg
Affiliated Researcher

Gustav’s primary research interests include service marketing and management, retail banking, value creation/destruction, and qualitative research methods such as, for example, netnography and narrative inquiry. In his PhD thesis, Gustav explored how customers perceive value in retail banking services. More about Gustav

Karl-Jacob Mickelsson
Affiliated Researcher

Jacob’s research focuses on the active role of the customer in service. What are the implications for services if we see the customer as active and empowered? And how does the digitalization of services change the role of the customer?

More about Jacob

Reza Movarrei
Affiliated Researcher

Reza’s research focuses on quantitative study of consumer decision making including value creation through conspicuous consumption, social consumption and gamified consumption of services and products. More about Reza

Minna Pura
Affiliated researcher

Minna's research focuses on strategic segmentation of customers, engagement models, loyalty, value-in-experience, perceived value and its' consequences. She does global BtoC research in e.g. gaming, mobile and e-commerce, health, and retailing. She is interested in joint-projects regarding predictive analytics, developing new KPI's, and measuring customer lifetime value. More about Minna

Bård Tronvoll
Affiliated Researcher

Bård’s research focuses mainly on (1) relationship between customers and firms mainly related to conflict situations (customer complaining behavior and service recovery); (2) service innovation (3) transformation of digital markets and (4) the concept of value creation and its foundational underpinnings. More about Bård

Lotta Vuoristo
Affiliated Researcher

Lotta is interested in customer relationships and loyalty; strategies, abnormalities and insights. Her research currently focuses on understanding inert customer relationships. More about Lotta

Anna Abramova
Doctoral Student

The main focus of Anna’s research is in Sales Management. Anna is looking at how social media can be used at different stages of a sales process. Her interest also lies in cross functional cooperation between sales and marketing departments and alignment of their KPIs and rewards. More about Anna 

Valeriia Chernikova
Doctoral Student

Valeriia's research focuses on usage of unstructured data in marketing analytics. She is particularly interested in studying different types of unstructured data used by companies as well as skills required from managers to successfully integrate such data into marketing decision-making. More about Valeriia

Phuong Dao
Doctoral Student

Dao's research focus is service design and Innovation - especially disruptive innovation in the digital industry. Dao studies how service design can be a strategic tool to improve digital innovations to make it product-market fit based on the customer orientation method. More about Dao

Apramey Dube
Doctoral Student

Apramey's research interests relate to consumer experience of service innovations. Working with smartphone apps, Apramey's research specifically focuses on the ways in which consumers experience smartphone apps and associated consumer insights which can be helpful for companies and app developers. More about Apramey

Marianne Dube
Doctoral Student

Marianne's research focuses on blog marketing and different ways how bloggers and companies could work together. She is also interested in what motivates people to produce and share content in social media. More about Marianne

Wuraola Falana
Doctoral Student

Wuraola is interested in consumer behaviour research but currently working on the drivers of consumer perception of brand innovativeness, how this perception can be changed and sustained. More about Wuraola

Jori Grym
Doctoral Student

I research how human beings make choices using decision theory. I'm especially interested in unconscious and ethical decision making. I study these subjects in a broad context but lately have been concentrating in the world of cryptocurrencies. More about Jori

Pekka Helle
Doctoral Student

During the past half a dozen years, Pekkas research has aimed to provide an alternative to the models of value creation that we have inherited from neoclassical economics. Pekkas natural areas of interest thus involves research within a stream of research called Service Logic (i.e. Service-Dominant Logic, Service Science). More about Pekka

Sonja Sarasvuo
Doctoral Student

Sonja's research interests include organizational identity, corporate branding and branding in business-to-business contexts. Particularly, her research focuses on the diversity of organizational identities through examining multiple stakeholders' perceptions over time. More about Sonja

Naomi Kasahara
Doctoral Student

Naomi´s research focuses on understanding how brand meaning is being formed in the Japanese cultural and social contexts and how Japanese culture influences on its formation from a customer perspective. Naomi completes his study by examining the mental activities of consumers´ minds that emerges from the interaction of social and biological processes. Beside mental activities, Naomi is also interested in cultural values of consumers. More about Naomi

Fares Khalil
Doctoral Student

The central focus of Fares's research is on the use of technology in supporting new service experiences. More specifically, Value Formation is looked at from the user's perspective while exploring how service managers can better leverage data and Machine Leaning within a human-centered framework. More about Fares

Tomas Lindström
Doctoral Student

Tomas is interested in brand images and measurement. His current research focuses on brand images evolve in different company stakeholder groups. Tomas is also interested in how market researchers' assumptions on brand image measurement shape how firms see the brand image and ultimately attempt to manage it.More about Tomas

Michaela Lipkin
Doctoral Student

Michaela's research focuses on understanding in what ways consumers within a brand community experience the brand. Besides this, she is also interested in service branding, brand communication and experiences in more general terms. More about Michaela

Irina Neganova
Doctoral Student

Irina's research interests concern the role of customers in service innovations. Particularly, she explores customer perspective on solution development. She also studies value co-creation in consumer communities relating to new service development. More about Irina

Virpi Näsänen
Doctoral Student

Virpi has a professional background in arts management and her current research focuses on marketing and market orientation of art organizations. She is also interested in service design in the field of arts and culture. More about Virpi

Arafat Rahman
Doctoral Student

Arafat is interested in transformative service research. He currently examines how transformative role can be conceptualized from provider’s perspective, and how the enactment of this role can lead to well-being outcomes for the recipients of services. More about Arafat

Maria Sandberg
Doctoral Student

Maria’s research interests include sustainable production-consumption systems, voluntary simplicity and sustainability discourses. Her current research focuses on sustainable housing. More about Maria

Sebastian Schauman
Doctoral Student

Sebastian is interested in the institutional dimension of markets and consumer practices. He focuses on how neo-institutional theory can be used to help conceptualize markets as institutions and how changes in consumption practices can be understood as the outcome of changes within the extra-individual dimensions that both enable and restrict particular acts of consumption. More about Sebastian

Hannu Tikkanen
Doctoral Student

Hannu is interested in how people make sense of health and wellbeing through the use of technology-based services, such as wearable devices and mobile applications. More generally, his research interests lie in the areas of Transformative Service Research and Consumer Culture Theory. More about Hannu

Kristoffer Wilén
Doctoral Student

Kristoffer's research interests include: social ecological economics; degrowth; ethics and the social logic of sustainable consumption; sustainability of consumerism, consumer culture, and economism; individualization and privatization of responsibility; commodification of life in marketing society. His PhD thesis is called 'Sustainable Consumption in a World of Disconnectedness'. More about Kristoffer