Robert Zniva is a graduate of the University of Vienna (diploma) and WU Vienna (PhD). He worked for the Austrian Economic Chambers in Vienna and Tokyo, a business consultancy, and the marketing department of Manner & Comp AG (an Austrian candy manufacturer). In 2008 he participated in the project “Aging Society” at the Institute for Retailing and Marketing at WU Vienna, a project funded by the city of Vienna to investigate the impact of demographic changes on the city’s population. He rejoined the Institute at WU Vienna as a Research Assistant in 2010. During his PhD Robert was a Visiting Scholar at the David F. Miller Center for Retailing Education and Research at the University of Florida (2013, 2014 and 2015) and the GeoDa Center for Geospatial Analysis and Computation at Arizona State University (2015). In 2016 he worked as an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Retailing and Marketing at WU Vienna. In 2017 he joined the Salzburg University of Applied Sciences as a Professor in Retailing and Marketing and is also the Head of Research of the Department of Business & Tourism since 2022. He also works as Lecturer & Adjunct Research Fellow at the Institute for Retailing and Data Science at WU Vienna and the marketing group of the Department of Business at Paris Lodron University Salzburg. He also works as a lecturer in executive programs like the circular economy program at the University of Salzburg Business School. 

His teaching and research interests are anchored in Marketing Research, Service Marketing, Retailing, Social Media and Consumer Behavior. His recent research revolves around changes in consumer behavior of older consumers in retailing. In this line of research, he is particularly interested in the impact of aging processes on consumers, retailing services and generally the retailing environment and the measurement of such processes. A second research stream of interest is the impact of in-store technology on consumer behavior in retailing. Here, Robert serves as the Lead of the Retailization Hub at Salzburg University of Applied Sciences, where he an his team investigates technology in stationary, online and hybrid retail environments. 

Roberts’s research efforts have been financially supported by several scholarships and grants. So far, he has received the Atlantis Scholarship of the NEURUS Fellows Program (2013), the WU High Potential Contact Weeks Scholarship (2015) and the WU Mobility Scholarship (2013/14). His research projects won substantial financial support fromthe FFG (Austrian Research Promotion Agency),  the state of Salzburg (WISS 2025) , Vienna Anniversary Fund, the Science Fund of the Vienna Chamber of Commerce, the ITG Salzburg and the Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG) . He was awarded the Vienna Prize for Retailing Research 2008. In 2011, he received an award for excellent teaching from the WU Vienna. Furthermore, he received the "WU Award for Special Achievements in Research and Teaching" and the “Prize of the Vienna Chamber of Commerce 2015”. In 2017 his PhD thesis won the ECR Dissertation Award 2017. In 2023 he received the Bets Reviewer Award of the International Journal of Consumer Studies. Students supervised by Robert win regularly national research and science prices.