Summary
Sven Mikolon is Associate Professor of Marketing and Co-Director of the Gandhi Centre for Inclusive Innovation at Imperial College Business School. Sven studied Business Administration and Economics at the Ruhr-University of Bochum (Germany) from where he also obtained his doctoral degree in business administration.
In his research Sven bridges the literature on organizational psychology with that on consumer behaviour and strategic marketing with a strong focus on the customer-company-interface. This work has relevance for managers who aim to place the customer at the centre of decision-making processes in organisations - from product development, to marketing, sales and services.
In one of Sven's current projects, he explores how the perceived complexity of professional services impacts customers’ cognitive resources available to them in real frontline interactions in the retail banking industry. An intriguing finding is that customers’ cognitive capacity was reduced at moderate levels of perceived service complexity while it was relatively high at low and high levels of perceived service complexity. The reason is that customers perceiving relatively high levels of service complexity presumably switched to heuristic processing of the professional service to save cognitive resources. The study has been published in the Journal of Service Research Web Link
Sven is an editorial board member of the Journal of Organizational Behavior and acts as ad hoc reviewer for the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science and for the Journal of Service Research.
Publications in Peer Reviewed Journals
Kreiner, Glen, Christine Mihelcic, and Sven Mikolon (2022) “Stigmatized Work and Stigmatized Workers”, in: Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, Vol. 9, 95-120, 2022.
Mikolon, Sven, Sascha Alavi, and Anika Reynders (2021), “The Catch-22 of Countering a Moral Occupational Stigma in Employee-Customer Interactions”, in: Academy of Management Journal, Vol. 64 (4), 1714-1739, 2021.
Dixon, Darcie, and Sven Mikolon (2021), "Cents of Self: How and When Self-Signals Influence Consumer Value Derived from Choices of Green Products", in: International Journal of Research in Marketing, Vol. 38 (2), 365-386, 2020.
Güntürkün, Pascal, Till Haumann, and Sven Mikolon (2020), “Disentangling the Differential Roles of Warmth and Competence Judgments in Customer-Service Provider Relationships”, in: Journal of Service Research, Vol. 23 (4), 476-503, 2020. Open Access Link
Mikolon, Sven, Glen Kreiner, and Jan Wieseke (2016), “Seeing You Seeing Me: Stereotypes and the Stigma Magnification Effect”, in: Journal of Applied Psychology, Vol. 101 (5), 639-656, 2016.
Mikolon, Sven, Anika Kolberg, Till Haumann, and Jan Wieseke (2015), “The Complex Role of Complexity: How Service Providers Can Mitigate Negative Effects of Perceived Service Complexity When Selling Professional Services”, in: Journal of Service Research, Vol. 18 (4), 513-528, 2015. Web Link.
Mikolon, Sven, Benjamin Quaiser, and Jan Wieseke (2015) “Don’t Try Harder: Using Customer Inoculation to Build Resistance Against Service Failures”, in: Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Vol. 43 (4), 512-527, 2015. (this article was featured by the Harvard Business Review: Web Link)
Wieseke, Jan, Florian Kraus, Michael Ahearne, and Sven Mikolon (2012; all authors contributed equally) “Multiple Identification Foci and Their Countervailing Effects on Salespeople’s Negative Headquarters Stereotypes“, in: Journal of Marketing, Vol. 76 (3), 1-20, 2012. (lead article) Web Link
Homburg, Christian, Jan Wieseke, Bryan Lukas, and Sven Mikolon (2011; all authors contributed equally) “When Salespeople Develop Negative Headquarters Stereotypes: Performance Effects and Managerial Remedies”, in: Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Vol. 39 (5), 664-682, 2011.