President & Professor of Digital Transformation, Author

Professor Kaplan holds a Master of Public Administration from the École nationale d’administration, an M.Sc. from ESCP Business School, and a B.Sc. from the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. He completed his Habilitation at the Sorbonne and his Ph.D. at the University of Cologne in cooperation with HEC Paris. 

Kaplan was visiting Ph.D. at INSEAD and participated in the International Teachers Programme at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University.

Before joining ESCP Business School, Kaplan started his career as marketing professor at the ESSEC Business School and Sciences Po Paris. 

Since May 2022, Kaplan is president and Professor of Digital Transformation at Kühne Logistics University in Hamburg. From 2017 to 2022, Kaplan has been Dean of ESCP Business School Paris, Sorbonne Alliance. Previously, he was the Rector of ESCP Berlin, acted as the School’s Dean for Academic Affairs/Provost and before as its Director of Brand and Communications. Moreover, Kaplan was elected Head of the Faculty’s marketing department.

Kaplan started doing research in the areas of mass customization, innovation, customer lifetime valuation, and relationship marketing. 

Since then, his research mainly deals with analyzing and decrypting the digital sphere. With more than 37,000 citations on Google Scholar, Kaplan was counted amongst the Top 50 Business and Management authors in the world according to John Wiley & Sons.

In 2020, Andreas Kaplan ranked in a Stanford study of the world’s top 2% of scientists. Kaplan received the annual Best Article Award from Business Horizons, sponsored by Elsevier, for his 2012 paper “If you love something, let it go mobile: Mobile marketing and mobile social media 4×4”.

In particular, his 2010 article co-authored with Michael Haenlein “Users of the world, unite! The challenges and opportunities of social media” published in Business Horizons is widely cited (over 25,000 times on Google Scholar and over 6,000 times in Scopus) and known in the field. This seminal article “Users of the World, Unite!” recurrently achieved first place in Science Direct’s annual list of the 25 most downloaded publications across all 24 core subject areas covered in Science Direct, ranging from management to engineering, psychology, or neuroscience and thus was downloaded more often than any other of the approximately 13.4 million papers in the collection.