Amplifon Chair in Customer Science
Held by Gaia Rubera
Full Professor in Marketing. She worked at Michigan State University and the University of Southern California before returning to Italy and to Bocconi, where she is Head of the Department of Marketing and course director of the courses Innovation and Marketing Analytics, Deep Learning for Computer Vision, and Social Media Marketing. She is Associate Editor of Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, International Journal of Marketing Research and Journal of Product Innovation Management. In 2017 she won the Emerald Citations of Excellence Award, which recognizes the 50 best articles published by the 300 best journals in management, business and economics worldwide. She also won the Best Paper Award in the area "Marketing to and Around the World" at the AMA (American Marketing Association) 2017 Winter Conference.
Joint Purpose
Amplifon and Bocconi University’s fruitful collaboration led to the establishment of the Amplifon Chair in Customer Science in 2021. It aims to deepen the understanding of customers, their journey and their loyalty through the most advanced tools of computer science and artificial intelligence. The Chair is held by Professor Gaia Rubera, Head of the Department of Marketing.
Core Activities
Core Activities
Research
The Amplifon Chair in Customer Science’s research program aims to develop a deeper understanding of customers through the use of artificial intelligence techniques. At the beginning of the last decade the most developed tools for this purpose involved textual analysis, used to interpret social media posts, with the addition of computer vision over the last few years, used to analyze images. The new frontier that Rubera intends to explore involves audio analytics, which make it possible, for example, to identify and match non-verbal behavioral cues of a call center operator, like the speed of presentation, the tone or the use of sighs and pauses, with the customer’s reply.
Students
The Chair's activities include an intensive research program and initiatives that involve students in educational challenges that bring them into direct contact with business reality. In the academic years 2020-2021 and 2022-2023, students in the Innovation and Marketing Analytics course participated in the Amplifon Data Challenge, as they had access for two months to Amplifon's data and platform to develop predictive models on consumer buying behaviors.
Communication and Dissemination
Over the years, the Chair’s activities will be enriched by the dissemination of Professor Rubera’s research results thanks to her participation in seminars and conferences organized by the most prestigious academic and institutional organizations.