In 1999, I took over the first chair of electronic commerce in Germany at Goethe University Frankfurt (www.ecommerce.wiwi.uni-frankfurt.de). In addition, I am a member of the managing board of the eFinance-Lab as well as the Schmalenbach Society and I am representing Germany as a “National Representative” at the European Marketing Community (EMAC).

My research interests include electronic commerce, online marketing (particularly programatic advertising and real-time advertising as well as price management), marketing analytics (including machine learning), financial innovations (FinTech, eg crowdfunding), and value-based customer management in particular the determination of "Customer Lifetime Values" as well as the value of "customer equity", often working with very large data sets ("big data").

I provide some of my research results in the form of "calculators" via own websites to the general public. For example, the crowdfunding calculator (http://www.crowdfunding-calculator.com) can be used to determine whether a Crowdfunding campaign will be promising. The advantages of so-called "Groupon events" can be determined with the coupon calculator (www.coupon-calculator.de), the “return cost calculator” evaluates various possibilities for transferring shipping and return costs to customers (http: // return-cost -calculator.com). Very early, we also implemented a simple model that determined optimal bids in search engine marketing (www.prosad.de).

I have a huge global network, I enjoy publishing very much and attach great importance to the training of young scientists. In its most recent ranking (2014) of all German - speaking business professors (more than 2,000 people), Handelsblatt did put me first place in the research effort of the last 5 years and the lifetime ranking leads me to position 9, which makes me the youngest professor in the top 9 of the lifetime ranking.

I founded Marini Systems GmbH (www.marini.de), supporting companies when implementing robotic selling solutions. About 50% of the 25 employees are IT developers, the other 50% help our partners and customers to implement those solutions.

My first professional occupation was a software developer at SAP, where I first programmed in Assembler and then developed one of the first interoperable applications in ABAP. The time there has shaped me very much and contributed to the fact that I am particularly interested in questions related to the interface between business informatics and marketing.

I enjoy spending my free time with my wife and our three adult children. We all like to travel. My daughters share my passion for skiing and my son my passion for chess, which I used to have done very intensively in the past. During summer time I also enjoy playing tennis.