Marko Sarstedt

Marko Sarstedt is a German academic and a marketing researcher. He is a Full Professor at LMU Munich and Adjunct Research Professor at Babeș-Bolyai-University.

Sarstedt is the recipient of five Emerald Citations of Excellence awards and three Emerald Literati Outstanding Paper awards for his papers. He is a member of the Clarivate Analytics' Highly Cited Researcher List. In 2019, he was listed among the most cited researchers across all scientific disciplines and is ranked by The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung as the second most influential business researcher in Germany in the research category. Sarstedt is the three-time recipient of the William R. Darden Award of the Academy of Marketing Science. He serves as Area Editor of Behaviormetrika and of Journal of Business Economics. He is the most cited author of some business journals such as Long Range Planning, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, European Business Review, Journal of Marketing Theory and Practice.

Education Sarstedt studied at LMU Munich where he completed his Diplom-Kaufmann degree, the German equivalent of Master of Science, in 2005. In 2007, he completed his Master of Business Research degree at this institution. He completed his Doctoral degree in Business Administration with summa cum laude at LMU Munich in 2008. Sarstedt received his Habilitation degree from the same university in 2012. In 2020, he was appointed adjunct research professor at Babeș-Bolyai University.

In 2019, he became a board member for research and innovation at Deutscher Marketing Verband.

On March 31, 2022, Babeș-Bolyai University awarded him the title Doctor Honoris Causa, the highest university distinction, for his remarkable contribution to enhancing the quality of academic research in business and economics, his methodological innovations in data analysis employing structural equations in the social sciences field, and his contribution to the development of the university's academic community, research activity and reputation.

In 2024, Sarstedt became President of the Academy of Marketing Science.

Research Sarstedt is a leading scholar on consumer behavior, research methodology, and psychometrics. As of 2024, his publications have been cited over 260,000 times. His research has been published in Nature Human Behaviour, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, International Journal of Research in Marketing, Journal of World Business, Multivariate Behavioral Research, Organizational Research Methods, and Psychometrika, among others. Sarstedt made several contributions on model estimation and specification, model evaluation, latent class analysis, measurement invariance assessment, and model comparisons in partial least squares structural equation modeling. He co-authored two widely adopted books on the method, A primer on partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM), which has been translated into Arabic, Chinese, German, Italian, Korean, Persian, and Spanish; and Advanced issues in partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM), which has been translated into Korean, Persian, Spanish, and Vietnamese. The former book was reviewed by Adrian Leguina as "a valuable reference to acquire basic grasps on PLS-SEM". He also stated that the book will become "a basic reference for students, teachers, researchers, and practitioners."

Sarstedt's research extends to psychometrics, particularly the use of single-item measures and the validity of measurement in the social sciences. In 2019 and 2020, he published papers in Multivariate Behavioral Research, Nature Human Behaviour, and Psychometrika in which he and his co-authors transferred the concept of measurement uncertainty to psychometrics.

Since his professorship at the Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg, Sarstedt gained interest in consumer behavior topics, particularly context effects. He has published conceptual and empirical papers on the generalizability and of the compromise and attraction effects. As part of this research, Sarstedt and his co-authors evaluated the impact of serotonin deficiency on the compromise effect, showing that the effect is the result of deliberate and demanding thought processes rather than intuitive decision making.

Since 2019, Sarstedt has also worked on sensory marketing topics. His research in this field deals with the impact of ambient scent on consumer behavior and the role of different environments in product acceptance tests.

Awards and honors 2009, 2019, 2023 - William R. Darden Award, Academy of Marketing Science 2015 - Taylor & Francis Citation Award 2015, 2017 - Emerald Citations of Excellence Awards 2022 - Awarded the title Doctor Honoris Causa by Babeș-Bolyai University