Viestintä, brändi ja markkinointi

Our mission is to advance meaningful marketing education through research. Our work explores how marketing and sales are taught and learned, emphasizing innovative pedagogical approaches that foster creativity and critical thinking, and engage learners deeply. We focus on developing marketing competencies essential for addressing the dynamic challenges of society through transformative learning.

We examine how education prepares students for professional success while shaping them into ethical contributors to society, and how artificial intelligence in marketing education can revolutionize teaching and career preparation. We seek to publish our research results in high-quality academic journals and foster academic discussion on marketing education. 

We offer a vibrant environment for doctoral candidates interested in advancing meaningful marketing education and marketing faculty development. Our research investigates how to create innovative and engaging learning experiences that prepare students to succeed in a rapidly changing world. You may explore critical areas such as marketing and sales competencies, transformative learning, and the integration of artificial intelligence into education.

We aim to understand how marketing can be taught to inspire ethical, impactful professionals to be ready to meet societal and industry needs. As a PhD candidate, you will collaborate with experienced researchers and actively participate in shaping the future of education in marketing. 

Our research is dedicated to advancing meaningful marketing education by bridging the gap between academia and practice. Our research focuses on creating innovative approaches to teaching marketing, developing essential competencies, and fostering transformative learning experiences that prepare students to become ethical, responsible professionals. We are particularly interested in how marketing education can meet the evolving needs of businesses and society. We welcome collaboration with businesses and organizations to co-develop research, share insights, and create impactful research-based education. Together, we can shape the future of marketing education and prepare professionals who are ready to meet upcoming challenges. 

The research program is led by Senior University Lecturer Minna-Maarit Jaskari.

Contact Information
Email: minna-maarit.jaskari@uwasa.fi 
 

Personas are fictitious persons that represent groups of people and help decision-makers to empathize with the group’s needs, wants, and circumstances, and to make informed decisions. Data-driven personas are generated from actual data about the groups of people. Our research team studies data-driven approaches to persona creation, evaluation, and application using state-of-the-art computational techniques, such as Generative AI, deepfakes, and Metaverse.

Our team members come from various backgrounds (e.g., marketing, computer science, engineering) and study personas in multiple contexts, including sustainable business growth. We are open to research collaboration with other teams, individual researchers (postdocs, professors), and organizations (businesses, non-profits, and policymakers). Read more about us on the Persona Team website.

We welcome applications from students in any major (but with an emphasis on business and computer science fields). Our team is built around a strong collaborative attitude and support for newcomers to be integrated into our research projects. We expect a strong work ethic and willingness to work for a common cause. In return, we provide:

• Forward-thinking supervision focused on increasing your productivity.
• Hands-on support for you to learn practical research skills.
• Mixed-method research opportunities (e.g., user studies, experiments, statistical analysis) in collaboration with specialists.
• Flexible work arrangements, including part-time studies.

See some of our current topical areas. Send an email to the program lead if you are interested in joining our team!

We are open to research and consultation that delivers real-world impact. Our team can help your organization better understand your customers, users, or stakeholders, and make informed decisions. Fields that benefit from personas include, for example, advertising, retail, e-commerce, education, public health, and technology and software development, among others.

In practice, we can collaborate with you in designing data collection activities, carry out persona generation, and train you in how to leverage personas in decision-making. We can also model a whole industry ecosystem as personas, which can be useful for simulating the impact of strategic decisions. 

The research program is led by Associate Professor Joni Salminen.

Contact Information
Email: jonisalm@uwasa.fi

We are pioneers in developing marketing knowledge to transform marketplace actors and marketing logics towards sustainability and wellbeing. We study phenomena related to consumption, the marketplace and society within the research traditions of Consumer Culture Theory, Transformative Consumer/Service Research and Macromarketing.

Our passion is to advance theoretical thinking based on understanding the inherent complexities and dynamics of consumption at various levels of culture and society. Collaborators within and outside our discipline are invited to join us in scientifically ambitious research projects. 

As supervisors, we support doctoral students in developing a strong expertise in studying the inherent complexities and dynamics of consumption across individual, community and societal levels. We welcome new team members who use qualitative and interpretative research to engage with and contribute to relevant theories, such as Practice Theory and Assemblage Thinking, in specific topical areas including food, energy consumption, fashion, home, animals, or wellbeing.

Doctoral students are encouraged to take critical approaches in their research and explore a broad array of topics, addressing, for example: 

• What are the cultural processes catalysing and challenging sustainable consumption in marketplaces? How to rethink marketing through understanding the complexities of the marketplaces?
• How to uncover the actions of market actors and their consequences beyond the boundaries of firms? How to rethink markets as heterogenous systems of various actors?
• How to strengthen the voice(s) of marginalized consumers? In what ways do dominant wellbeing paradigms align or conflict with the lived realities of marginalized consumer communities?

We help companies and non-profit actors to understand their markets and clarify their actions towards sustainable transformation. We partner with industries operating in areas such as food, energy, care for the elderly, animals, fashion, home, leisure, cultural heritage, and welfare technology. We are experts in communicating and popularizing topical research insights for wider audiences. We collaborate actively with media and policymakers seeking to enlighten the ambiguities of everyday consumption, especially from the viewpoints of sustainability and wellbeing 

The research program is led by Associate Professor Hanna Leipämaa-Leskinen.

Contact Information
Email: hanna.leipamaa-leskinen@uwasa.fi

Our mission is to help citizen-consumers, business, society and the globe to flourish. We value inter-disciplinary collaboration for its innovation potential. We combine theoretical ideas from business studies, natural science and social inquiry to holistically understand real-life phenomena. This approach enables fruitful partnering with scholarly ambitious research projects.

Topically, we tackle, for instance, consumers’ senso-emotional experiences with foods, and the adoption of sustainable and well-being-promoting solutions such as personalized health services. Methodologically, we favour quantitative techniques ranging from online surveys to field experiments. We seek to publish our research results in prestigious academic journals. To maximize the impact, we favour cross-field co-writing processes.

We invite new talents to join our team. With us, they will grow into professional researchers who can find a career in academia, industry, or the public sector. We embrace energetic, witty, independent, and courageous people who want to make a difference. We offer a smooth landing to our down-to-earth team and provide socio-emotional support from day one. We guide students on their every step and turn on the path toward their PhD degree. We strive to engage students with funded projects delivering high-quality data for their dissertations.

In our program, doctoral students can tackle a broad array of pressing challenges, including: 

• What factors influence citizens’ willingness to adopt reusable fast-moving consumer goods packages?
• How can individual’s well-being be harnessed to encourage consumption curtailment?
• How can sustainable food consumption choices such as favouring meat alternatives be socio-culturally destigmatized and mainstreamed?

Our research guides organizations in the planning and execution of actions promoting sustainable consumption. We help companies and non-profit actors to design consumer-driven products and services, gain market insights, build persuasive brands, and develop marketing tools encouraging societal welfare and green transition. Continuous collaboration with diverse food, technology and packaging value chain partners across Europe sets us apart as a research service-provider. We aspire to support our partners to thrive at the forefront of innovations and new business. 

The research program is led by Professor Harri Luomala.

Contact Information
Email: harri.luomala@uwasa.fi

Our research program focuses on the rapidly evolving landscape of sustainable business practices. We strive to uncover actionable pathways for embedding sustainability into organizational behaviours, value creation relationships, and the intricate dynamics of business and innovation ecosystems.

Collaborators are invited to join us in tackling urgent and cutting-edge research questions, including: 

• How can business ecosystems effectively catalyse the development and adoption of sustainable innovations?
• What is the role of partnerships, alliances, and stakeholder collaboration in driving circular economy transitions?
• How can market-shaping activities promote the diffusion and institutionalization of sustainable business models on global and local scales? 

Through rigorous empirical research, we aim to expand the boundaries of knowledge in areas such as sustainable innovation, circular business model development, stakeholder engagement, ecosystem co-creation, and strategies for market innovation and market shaping.

We invite doctoral candidates passionate about redefining markets and shaping the future of sustainability. Our program offers a vibrant, interdisciplinary research environment that nurtures critical thinking and methodological rigor. Students are equipped with the skills to address complex challenges in sustainable business innovation, circular economy practices, and ecosystem management, drawing from marketing, business management, and innovation streams of research. 

Doctoral research in our program covers a broad array of topics, including: 

• Developing frameworks for actor engagement and sustainable value co-creation in ecosystems.
• Investigating the role of business relationships in driving sustainable market transformations.
• Exploring the convergence, scaling, and institutionalization of circular business models into market innovations.

We partner with industries such as packaging, textiles, furniture, and retail to transform sustainability challenges into opportunities for delivering customer and societal value while building a competitive advantage. Our initiatives with industry partners include: 

• Redesigning supply chains to enhance sustainability and resilience
• Supporting value chain actors in implementing and integrating circular business models across networks.
• Co-developing innovative tools for measuring, optimizing, and communicating environmental impacts within business ecosystems.

The research program is led by Professor Hannu Makkonen.

Contact Information
Email: hannu.makkonen@uwasa.fi