Fully Funded PhD in Marketing, Wageningen University, Netherlands

Expires on: 05/02/2024

The Marketing and Consumer Behaviour group of Wageningen University is looking for an enthusiastic and ambitious PhD candidate to fulfil an essential position in the NWO funded project “Tackling fixophobia: Improving repair practices for consumer electronics”. The project aims to develop a circular economy for consumer electronics.

In today’s linear economy, the rapid replacement of consumer electronics leads to CO2-emissions, resource scarcity, e-waste and pollution, thereby providing important environmental and societal challenges. Extending the lifetimes of consumer electronics is essential to tackle these challenges. A repair economy in which all value chain actors (incl. consumers) adopt repair practices can lead to such extended product lifetimes. Yet, currently all relevant actors experience barriers that withhold them from trusting, accepting, and adopting repair practices, leading to ‘Fixophobia’.

In general, the “Tackling Fixophobia” project aims to provide the much-needed scientific theories, societal tools, and repair system innovations to encourage a multi-actor system change and enhance trust, acceptance and adoption of repair practices for consumer electronics. To achieve societal impact, we collaborate intensely with a unique consortium, including all actors in the consumer electronics value chain: Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs), (design) consultancies, retail, repair organisations, consumer organisations, network/trade organisations, and waste organisation. Three PhD students will work on this project (for more information, see: NWO-KIC Circular Economy).

In the current PhD position, you will work together with all project partners, and investigate the consumer perspective. Your responsibility will be to examine the factors that influence consumers’ repair behaviour, to develop a taxonomy of marketing and service innovations for repair, and to develop interventions that stimulate consumers to engage in repair practices. This will result in the development of a marketing repair tool and a thorough understanding of the consumer perspective. Moreover, in the final project you will intensively collaborate with the design (TU Delft), value chain (University of Maastricht) and law partners (Erasmus University) to together develop an integrated framework on repair. Interdisciplinary research is thus a valuable part of the project.

Qualifications 

1. You have: a completed  MSc University degree;
2. background in consumer behavior (e.g. consumer science, marketing, social psychology, behavioral economics). Other backgrounds will not be considered;
3. a high level of and interest in sustainable/circular marketing/consumer behavior;
4.  statistical/ modelling skills and experience with quantitative data collection (survey research, lab and natural experimental research are parts of this project);
5. an interest in conducting qualitative research (conducting interviews is part of this project);
6. openness and willingness to collaborate with people from other scientific disciplines, and the ability to interact effectively with both academic and diverse stakeholder audiences;
7. clear scientific ambition in the conduct and publication of the research (the project is expected to result in a PhD thesis and scientific publications);
8. ability to work independently as well as in a team, take initiative, and work towards results in a systematic way;
9.  the curiosity and motivation to address important real-world problems through rigorous and ambitious academic inquiry;
10. an interest in student-focused teaching (10% of your position will include teaching);fluency in English language.

The gross salary for the first year is € 2.770 – per month rising to € 3.539,-  in the fourth year in according to the Collective Labour Agreements for Dutch Universities (CAO-NU) (scale P).