Four Generations in One Room: SALTY 2026 in Leuven
A conference report by by Işın Acun, Ph.D. candidate at WU Vienna
SALTY stands for Sönke Albers Lehrstuhl Treffen Yearly. Sönke Albers is one of the leading figures in German marketing scholarship. Each September the SALTY family meets by invitation in a different city, hosted by one of its members. At SALTY, “academic family” has a fairly literal meaning. My supervisor did her PhD with one of Sönke Albers’s students, which makes me part of the third generation of a network now spanning four. This year Alexander Edeling and Gijs van Bussel of KU Leuven hosted us from September 27 to 29, a welcome program on Sunday followed by two days of sessions. Around a hundred of us came from some twenty universities, eight from WU Vienna. It was my fifth SALTY.
From Kiel to Leuven
The first generation of SALTYs were Sönke’s own doctoral students and postdocs, mostly in Kiel. He was in Leuven himself. Introductions are short: once you say which university you come from, everyone knows whose student you are and which branch of the family tree you belong to. Most SALTYs work quantitatively, as Sönke did. The professor asking about your paper has often known your supervisor since her PhD days. These “family ties” make it easier to get to know colleagues at other universities, and to find familiar faces when you return in subsequent years.
Time for difficult questions
Each research presentation follows a set script: one room, forty-five minutes. There’s time to walk through a modeling choice and take questions. The questions can be blunt, even intimidating when they come from colleagues you know. But the aim is developmental. Better to face the tough queries here, with room to discuss, than to encounter them for the first time in a journal review. And with the same group reconvening next September, the feedback lands differently: the people pressing you now are the ones who will see the work evolve.
Research in Leuven
The six research presentations were wide-ranging. Max Althaus (Goethe University, Frankfurt) introduced the Frankfurt Research Data Service, through which around 30,000 Germans share their search, browsing, streaming, and purchase histories with researchers. Robert Bootz (Cologne) used data on 5,000 films to examine how much of a cast and crew a director should rehire. Sophie Berghüser (LMU, Munich) used computer vision on the photos in luxury resale listings to pick out signs of authenticity and estimated what each is worth to buyers. Julian Ruoff (Tübingen) examined local inequality and status consumption. Isabel Münch (Münster) analysed 12,000 shareholder letters to study sales strategy, and Yana Asenova (Kühne Logistics University) explored the relationship between restaurants’ social media activity and their financial results.
Two further presentations focused on AI. Felix Anton Sklenarz and Karin Lauer from McKinsey & Company delivered a keynote on agentic AI, while Timo Mandler (NEOMA, Rouen) discussed AI for quantitative marketing research.
Els Breugelmans and Bart Larivière, editors of the Journal of Retailing and the Journal of Service Research, respectively, also joined an hour-long Meet the Editors session moderated by Manfred Krafft. Afterwards, they joined the group at dinner, with opportunities to continue the conversation.
Conversations beyond the sessions
Sunday’s city tour showed how closely Leuven’s history is tied to its university. The town asked for a university in 1425 because its cloth trade was dying, handed the new university its cloth hall in 1432, and the university remains quartered there today. Even the Groot Begijnhof, a 13th century women’s religious retreat, houses the university’s Faculty Club.
That evening, the PhD students gathered for a welcome dinner at Domus. For me, dining together is the easiest way to get to know my academic cousins from other universities. Meeting every year gives introductory conversations a chance to grow into friendships and future collaborations.
Monday brought the wider SALTY family together for an aperitif on the Oude Markt and the gala dinner at the Faculty Club, with a surprise saxophone performance by Bart Larivière. The afterparty is a tradition too.
What we take home
For PhD students, SALTY is worth attending even without making a presentation. Listening to detailed discussions helps you reflect on your own work, while socializing helps build relationships across universities.
SALTY’s value becomes clear over repeated visits. You return home with feedback to work through, friendships that reach beyond your own university, and fond, shared memories. By next September, there is progress to discuss and another reunion to look forward to.
Thanks go to Alex and Gijs, together with Camila Verhoeven, Noëlla Bruyninckx, and Wim Meulemans, for making the Leuven meeting possible, and to McKinsey for sponsoring it.
Read more: Marie Brand's 2024 interview with Sönke Albers for this newsletter, A Journey Through Academic Leadership with Sönke Albers.
This article was written by
Işın Acun
Ph.D. candidate at the WU, Vienna
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