Researchers aim to generate new knowledge (Figure 1). I received my doctorate degree in Business Administration (a PhD in Marketing) at the triple-crowned Koç University Graduate School of Business in Istanbul. I gained course design and delivery experience at TED, abbreviation for Türk Eğitim Derneği, Turkish Education Association, University (TEDU) in Ankara.
Figure 1: Knowledge Generation and Sharing
Figure 1 illustrates how research, scholarship and teaching services work together for knowledge generation and knowledge sharing. Innovation, strategic brand management, sustainability and pricing are my main areas of scholarly interest.
I am grateful to directly learn from wonderful scientists, Raj Echambadi, Stefan Wuyts, Koen Pauwels, Rik Pieters and Berk Ataman, among other leading scholars. My doctorate degree specializes in developing and testing theories by means of statistics and mathematics, and exploring relationships via statistics to gain insights from data.
A key area of my research revolves around pricing dynamics, following my doctorate thesis. I had two working papers with my doctoral co-advisors, Koen Pauwels and Berk Ataman, and a working project with Erdem Basci. In the first working paper, we delve into explaining the phenomenon of price response asymmetry at brand-SKU level, and examine a dataset of 243,150 product time-series from 2,178 brands across a sample of 742 retail stores in consumer markets in the United States. We inquire on the process in explaining the price response asymmetry phenomenon, and identify labor market resilience as a key variable on the premise of the regulatory focus theory. In related research on pricing and price response, the focus is on business cycles.
My research article, “Privacy Concerns in Consumer E-commerce Activities and Response to Social Media Advertising: Empirical Evidence from Europe” that I wrote with Tekin Kose is a very good case that illustrates complexities in research. The study investigates the relationship between consumers purchase response to social media advertisements, that is, participation in e-commerce, when consumers engage in online privacy protection activities. Drawing on a representative sample of 153,053 consumers from 29 European countries, before GDPR, findings underscore the significance of empowering consumers with control over their online privacy. This finding should motivate online retailers to give more (not less) control to potential customers over their online privacy, as that accentuates effectiveness of social media advertisements. For this research project with Tekin Kose, we reinstated TEDU as a research institution with the European Commission and were able to gain access to Eurostat microlevel datasets. The paper is published in the prestigious interdisciplinary journal Computers in Human Behavior. This journal is in top 1 percent in Arts and Humanities, and top 4 percent in General Psychology, with a CiteScore of 19.1.
In terms of scholarship, I worked with AnnMarie Hanlon who edited the chapter I contributed to the SAGE Handbook of Digital Marketing in 2022. This publication in a reference-book provides a theory-based review of e-commerce types in business and consumer markets, particularly business to business (B2B) and business to consumer (B2C) e-commerce with an application of transaction cost economics theory. The article offers a conceptual framework for e-commerce.
Overall, my research practice revolves around product innovation and brand management with a focus on pricing and digital/ social media. I desire to have a significant contribution to human development through impactful research. I am grateful to the universities that has offered me the research environment and the academic freedom.