Pietro Zidda

Pietro Zidda is a full professor at the University of Namur (UNamur) specializing in marketing and management. He has been Dean of the Faculty of Economics, Social Sciences, and Management since August 2022.

He is a member of the Namur Digital Institute (NaDI) and the Center for Research on Consumption and Leisure (CeRCLe), both at UNamur, and of the Center on Consumers & Marketing Strategy (CCMS), a joint initiative of UCLouvain and UNamur.

He studied management sciences (management engineering) at the Université Catholique de Louvain (Mons campus, FUCaM) and began his academic career as a retail marketing researcher in Prof. Bultez's research group. He continued his research as an ICM Fellow at the J.L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management (Northwestern University, USA) and obtained his PhD in Economics and Management from UCLouvain-Mons and the Intercollegiate Center for Management Science (ICM-CIM), with a thesis on sampling methods for calibrating point-of-sale choice models.

His main research interests concern retail marketing in general and, more specifically, the mathematical modeling of consumer choice behaviors, particularly in the field of customer relationship management (e.g., brand loyalty) but also in the adoption and evaluation of new technologies by consumers (e.g., mobile payment, collaborative platforms, interactive recommendation systems). He has published in the Journal of Retailing, Journal of Business Research, Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, International Journal of Wine Business Research, Tourism Analysis, European Journal of Operational Research, and other publications, as well as in the proceedings of international conferences (Marketing Science, ACR, EMAC, AFM, EIRASS, AWBR, etc.).

He is regularly invited as a visiting professor by universities and management schools in Belgium (Louvain School of Management, UCL) and abroad (Kedge Business School, Skema Business School, EM Strasbourg, and Iéseg School of Management).

He was twice Director of the Department of Management Sciences at UNamur (2008-2010 & 2015-2018), Director of the Center for Research on Consumption and Leisure (CeRCLe) at UNamur, Director of the Center on Consumers & Marketing Strategy (CCMS), and a member of the Executive Committee of the Louvain School of Management (UCLouvain), responsible for academic programs. Recently, he served as President of the Academic Body Council of UNamur.