Professor Jacob has held the position of Professor of Marketing at ESCP Business School Berlin campus since January 2002.
In this position, he has also had teaching assignments at institutions in different regions including Western Europe, Central and Eastern Europe, India, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. He has extensive teaching experience in marketing at the undergraduate, graduate, postgraduate, PhD, and executive levels. He is also involved in business consulting.
He studied business administration at the Universität des Saarlandes, where he graduated in 1989 with the degree of Diplom-Kaufmann. During his studies, he was an exchange student at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor (USA) from 1985 to 1986. In 1989, he began work on his PhD while serving as an assistant lecturer at Freie Universität Berlin. From this time, he specialised in business-to-business marketing issues. Professor Jacob earned his doctorate in 1994 with a dissertation on product customisation in the industrial sector. He continued his academic career with a Habilitation project (post-doctoral qualification to supervise research) at the same university. This was completed in 2001 with research on industrial business relationships. In the academic year 1997–1998, he reinforced his international orientation as a visiting professor at the University of Western Sydney in Australia.