Research Interests

Professor Bruno specializes in using actual transactional and market data from companies to understand marketing phenomena and help decision making.

• Customer long-term dynamics

  Interactions with customers not only affect customer response in the short run, but have also lasting effects in the way customers behave in the long term. For instance, a marketing message may not immediately affect sales, but may influence the customer during the next sales cycle. Customers may pay a high price, but later switch to other suppliers. These examples call for looking at behavior beyond the timeframe of the transaction. Professor Bruno develops dynamic models that can capture these changes in behavior.

• Granular targeting
  

  With more detailed data about customers and customer behavior, targeting is becoming highly granular. For instance, marketers should not only target individual A rather than individual B, but target individual A in a specific context. Another instance where we need more granularity is going beyond the concept of the household as a monolythic unit of decision making and looking at individuals within a household with interdependent preferencees. Prof. Bruno’s research is looking at the use of loyalty card data to estimate preferences of individuals within a household and show that indivdual targeting can lead to substantial increases in profitability.

• Digital advertising
  

  All communication channels are becoming digital channels, meaning that we are moving from a mass broadcasting context to one where we can target individuals with specific message or specific advertising intensity. The challenge is to understand the variability in the way consumers receive and are influenced by advertising message.

Curriculum Vitae

Hernán A. Bruno is a Professor of Marketing and Digital Environment at the University of Cologne since September 2015. Before joining the University of Cologne, Professor Bruno was a faculty member at INSEAD in Fontainebleau, France (2008–2015) and at Erasmus University in Rotterdam, Netherlands (2007–2008). He holds a Master in Research and a Marketing Ph.D. from London Business School. Prior to his career in business academia, he was a researcher in Analytical Chemistry at the University of Buenos Aires and a consultant at McKinsey & Company.

Professor Bruno models marketing phenomena using tools from statistics and economics. His models attempt to discover hidden patterns in marketing data. These models can be applied as a support in marketing decision making or used to generate insights into basic marketing phenomena. His work has been presented at the most important marketing conferences and published in Marketing Science and Journal of Marketing Research.

Business Expertise

Management Education

Professor Bruno has been involved in Executive Education for half a decade, developing customized programmes or sessions for  companies and in open-enrollment programmes (at INSEAD). His teaching models depend on the audience, but the general themes are:

• How to bring a customer perspective to the business unit strategy
• How to deal with commoditization
• How to deal with the challenges of bringing new technologies to market
• How to manage marketing metrics for the short- and long-term
• How to think about the ongoing digital transformation and plan for the next 10 years

Insights from company data

Prof. Bruno’s research originates from issues companies face in dealing with complex data. So the team at Marketing and Digital Environment is always looking to find win-win collaboration opportunities with companies making the most of their data.