Pietro Zidda is full professor of marketing and management at the University of Namur (UNamur). Since August 2022, he is the Dean of the Faculty of Economics, Social Sciences and Management.
He is member of the Namur Digital Institute (NaDI) and of the Center for Research on Consumption and Leisure (CeRCLe), both at UNamur and of the Center on Consumers and Marketing Strategy (CCMS), a joint initiative of UCL and UNamur.
He studied business engineering/management sciences at the Université Catholique de Louvain (Mons Campus, FUCaM) and started his academic career as a researcher in retailing in Prof. Bultez' research group, then became ICM-fellow at the J.L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management (Northwestern University, USA). He obtained his doctorate in management from the UCLouvain-Mons and the Intercollegiate Center for Management Science (ICM-CIM), with a dissertation on sampling designs for the calibration on store choice models.
His main research interests concern retail marketing and management in general and more specifically the modeling of consumer choice behaviors, particularly in the field of customer relationship management (e.g., store and brand loyalty) but also in the consumer adoption and evaluation of new technologies (e.g., mobile payment, collaborative platform, interactive recommendation system).
He has published among others in 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 as well as in the proceedings of international conferences (Marketing Science, ACR, EMAC, AFM, EIRASS, AWBR, etc.)
He is regularly invited as guest professor by Belgian (Louvain School of Management, UCLouvain) as well as foreign universities/business schools (Kedge Business School, Skema Business School, EM Strasbourg and Iéseg School of Management).
He has been twice head of the business administration department of the University of Namur (2008-2010 & 2015-2018), director of the Center for Research on Consumption and Leisure (CeRCLe) at UNamur, director of the Center on Consumers and Marketing Strategy (CCMS), and member of the executive committee of the Louvain School of Management (UCL), in charge of academic study programs. Recently, he chaired the Council of the Academic Body of UNamur.
Consumer choice modelling, relationship marketing, technology adoption/evaluation, retail management, wine marketing