Farewell: Professor Dr Jürgen Lürssen - "Marketing is my passion"

2021-09-21 The professor of business administration, especially marketing, is leaving Leuphana and retiring. His career guidebooks also make Lürssen's ideas accessible to a broad audience.

Portrait of Professor Dr Jürgen Lürssen ©Leuphana/Brinkhoff/Mögenburg
Professor Dr Jürgen Lürssen

The thesis is deliberately exaggerated: Only about ten percent of professional success is determined by professional competence, writes Prof. Dr. Jürgen Lürssen in his guidebooks. In order to climb the career ladder, networking and soft skills as well as negotiating skills are also very important. "Especially in large companies, hierarchies still play a significant role. To get ahead, you have to know and understand the mechanisms," says the marketing expert. Before his time as a professor at the University of Applied Sciences Northeast Lower Saxony and later at Leuphana, Jürgen Lürssen worked in the private sector for a total of 17 years. He worked in consumer goods marketing and management for two large industrial groups and looks back on a very successful career. "Back then I learned everything about product management as well as advertising and sales promotion - from TV and posters to unusual campaigns such as a skywriter where an aeroplane wrote the brand name of a detergent in the air, explains Jürgen Lürssen.

Nevertheless, he switched to the University of Applied Sciences Northeast Lower Saxony in 1999: "Marketing is my passion, but I like to pass on my knowledge just as much." Jürgen Lürssen himself comes from a family of teachers. As a former professor at a university of applied sciences, his career guides are aimed at professionals and practitioners. His first book "Die heimlichen Spielregeln der Karriere: wie Sie die ungeschriebenen Gesetze am Arbeitsplatz für Ihren Erfolg nutzen" was published in 2001.

Jürgen Lürssen will leave Leuphana at the end of September, but he wants to continue sharing his knowledge: Together with a partner, he has founded the "Society for Congress Management". It offers further training in online sales: "We teach sales strategies for the consumer goods industry and retail on Amazon and other platforms at our sales congresses."

Jürgen Lürssen studied business administration with a focus on marketing at the universities of Hamburg and Berlin (FU) until 1982. He then worked as a marketing assistant and later as a junior product manager at Henkel in Düsseldorf. In 1988 he completed his part-time doctorate (Dr. rer. pol.) in the field of psychology of consumer behaviour at the Free University of Berlin. From 1989 to 1995 Jürgen Lürssen was first Product Manager, then Marketing Director at Moulinex GmbH in Cologne. He then moved to the Swiss Moulinex subsidiary as sole managing director. In 1999, he accepted a professorship in business administration at the University of Applied Sciences in North-East Lower Saxony. After the merger with the University of Lüneburg, Jürgen Lürssen became Professor of Business Administration at Leuphana University Lüneburg in 2005.