’The Dutch are good with optimisation issues’

Wang defended his PhD thesis, which was completed under the supervision of Prof. Marc Salomon, in June of last year. After 4 years in Amsterdam, he moved to China, where he is now assistant professor of Innovation and Information Management at the University of Hong Kong. Marketing, he states, has in some respects progressed further than other disciplines when it comes to the deployment of machine learning (ML). At the same time, there is considerable room for improvement. 'Take, for example, Albert Heijn, which knows a lot about the buying behaviour of its customers but doesn't know how customers behave outside the shop. For products that haven't been sold before, you don't know what interests your customers.' What he makes clear here is that many individual companies lack important data. Wang is interested in optimising marketing campaigns.