Professor Alex Skandalis Head of the Department of Marketing lancaster.ac.uk/lums/marketing Welcome to Marketing at Lancaster University Management School (LUMS). In these pages, I am delighted to introduce you to our department and showcase some of the great work that my colleagues are doing, highlighting just why the subject is so often at the forefront of business and public engagement. Our Marketing department is a proven world leader. Lancaster is ranked in the top 50 worldwide for the subject in the latest QS World Rankings by Subject (2024), and third in the UK by the Guardian University Guide 2024. We are the longest-established Marketing department in the UK and our research remains at the cutting edge. It is one of the six subject areas that contribute to LUMS’ status as number one for research power among all UK business schools. Our expertise that covers the whole range of the Marketing discipline, from consumer research to market dynamics, social media and digital marketing to sustainable innovation and health inequalities, amongst others. You can find examples of this work across the diverse articles in this special edition of our Fifty Four Degrees magazine. From witchcraft to gambling, from Rio de Janeiro’s favelas to the outer boundaries of the universe centuries in the future, we will take you on a whirlwind tour of our staff and their skills, many of whom teach the same subjects on our undergraduate and/or postgraduate programmes, bringing their real-world experience and theoretical insights into the classroom for the benefit of our students. Josi Fernandes starts our journey on the streets of Rio, where entrepreneurs have made a business of marketing danger. Josi brings first-hand experience of the favelas and their people to her work, and shows how marketers can make something others may view as a negative into a commercial opportunity. Digital marketing is a key area for almost all businesses in the present day, and is an area where our students are keen to develop their skills and knowledge. Among the community here in Lancaster we have experts in social media influencers – showing the types of behaviour they need to avoid if they are to keep followers on side, and how online witches are using social media platforms to create a marketplace for themselves. More traditional marketing methods can be seen in the work of Margaret Hogg on how brands sell products to women; in the words of LUMS graduate JP Kuehlwein, an expert on luxury brands; and in how tourist organisations market dark tourism sites to visitors in a variety of ways. Within LUMS, our researchers try to make a positive and tangible impact on society. This is brilliantly illustrated in the work of Carolyn Downs on gambling here in the North West of England. By working with public health bodies and other organisations, Carolyn looks at how best to combat problem gambling. This drive to help vulnerable groups in society can also be seen in the work of Chihling Liu on son preference in China. Chihling shows how daughters in some Chinese families are treated poorly compared to male siblings, and suffer throughout their lives because of it. The potential to change attitudes and policy can be seen within her findings. Beyond this, Mike Ryder takes you into the world of science fiction, and Emre Tarim to the darker realms of refugees looking for work in their new homelands. Our research informs our teaching, and likewise our lecturers gain much from teaching that drives forward their research. This takes students beyond standard textbook learning to investigate and tackle issues that employers value and that are at the heart of modern society. I hope you enjoy discovering our work; and if you would like more information then please do not hesitate to contact us. Welcome FIFTY FOUR DEGREES | 3
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