This research seminar was made up of 2 talks.

How and when can firms build (extended) customer need knowledge through customer linking practices?

Speaker: Dr Sabrina Thornton

Dr Sabrina Thornton will present a study that aims to understand how firms can employ customer linking practices to obtain customer need knowledge for organizational innovation processes. The study responds to calls for research on the intersection between marketing and innovation. The objectives of our study are twofold. Firstly, we aim to explore how firms can employ customer linking practices to build customer need knowledge. Secondly, we aim to improve the understanding of the conditions under which customer linking practices are effective in building such knowledge for innovation purposes. Through a systematic literature review, this study identifies four customer linking practices to connect with direct and indirect customers. In addition, supplier firms may combine specific customer linking practices into multi-mode approaches, which can vary in their particular composition. The characteristics of such a system of practices may influence the nature of customer need knowledge that a firm can obtain and, in consequence, its innovation performance.

Influencer culture: research and policy

Speaker: Dr Sophie Bishop

Dr. Sophie Bishop will discuss her research on influencer culture in the UK, particularly looking at labour, inequality and the challenges for policy and regulation. Based on her ongoing ethnographic research in influencer ecologies, she will discuss how creative work and consumer cultures are increasingly shaped by social media platforms, and the implications for labour, representation and discrimination.

Speaker bios

Dr Sabrina Thornton specialises in business-to-business marketing, particularly in the field of inter-organisational relationships and organisational networking. She published in leading journals, such as Journal of Product Innovation Management, Industrial Marketing Management and Journal of Business Research. Her consultancy and knowledge transfer work has benefited businesses she has worked with in sports, retail and manufacturing industries. Her research is inherently interdisciplinary, spanning across marketing, strategy and innovation. Her current research includes two main strands: a substantive strand, strategic business network and innovation, and a methodological strand, the applications of qualitative comparative analysis in a configuration theoretical framework.

Dr Sophie Bishop is a Lecturer in Cultural and Creative Industries at Sheffield University Management School . Her ongoing work on influencer culture in the UK has been published in journals such as New Media & Society, Social Media + Society and Communication, Culture and Critique (and more). She is the Specialist Advisor for the UK Parliamentary Inquiry into influencer culture. She also co-runs several other projects, including 'Algorithmic Autobiographies and Fictions' a public workshop encouraging participants to use their ad data as a creative prompt for fiction writing and artistic interpretation.