Field of Work
Prof. Christina Kühnl’s key research areas are Customer Experience (Management), Digital Marketing and Sales as well as Product and Innovation Marketing.
In Customer Experience (Management; CX, CXM), she derived a fundamental conceptualization of this management approach and investigated its implications for consumers and companies in the business-to-consumer context. Current projects focus, among others, on how personalization can be implemented effectively along the customer journey and which role the customer experience and its management play in the business-to-business context.
Through her research in Digital Marketing and Sales, she identified central digital business capabilities (digital strategy, digital integration, digital control) and empirically provided evidence for their positive influence on customer and company performance. Current projects examine personalized recommendations as well as key success drivers of social media posts on Twitter and LinkedIn. She thereby pays special attention to gender effects and the particularities of the business-to-business context (“social selling”).
In Product and Innovation Marketing, she focuses on (new) product design and measuring its effects on consumer behavior. Additionally, she examines the influence of multisensory marketing on consumers especially with regard to the combination of haptic and auditive stimuli. Her research on the success factors of new product management addresses the questions (1) whether integration practices in innovation projects differ between new services and new products and (2) how sound symbolism influences the success of international brand names.
Personal Information
Since 2020, Prof. Christina Kühnl holds the Chair of Marketing at the University of Stuttgart. Previously, she was Professor of Marketing Management, Innovation & Product Design at ESB Business School, Reutlingen University. After studying Business Administration with an Intercultural Qualification (British/American Studies) in Mannheim and Lyon, she worked as a research assistant at the University of Mannheim, where she received her Ph.D. in 2010 and her Venia Legendi in 2016. She taught and conducted research at the University of Mannheim, the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, the Mannheim Business School, and the German Graduate School (GGS) in Heilbronn.
For her research, she has received multiple scholarships (among others, the Fast Track Program of the Robert Bosch Foundation and a Jackstädt Fellowship of the Dr. Werner Jackstädt Foundation) and national as well as international awards from business and academia (e.g. Schaeffler FAG Award, Hunt-Maynard Award of the American Marketing Association).
Since 2021, she is the Head of the Examination Committee Economics at the University of Stuttgart and, since 2023, she is a member of the board of directors of the “Förderkreis Betriebswirtschaft an der Universität Stuttgart e.V.”.