Anne-Sybille Meinck, a student at Maastricht University, was recently proclaimed the winner of the DSM B2B Marketing Award for 2004. Her paper, entitled ‘Brand Equity Inside? The role of brand equity in B2B markets’ won her a cash prize of €3,500 plus an invitation to spend a day at DSM discussing the viability of her branding ideas with experienced marketing practitioners.

DSM B2B Marketing Award
The B2B Marketing Award, which was presented this year for the first time, is the joint brainchild of DSM’s Branch Organization Marketing & Sales and the Corporate Recruitment Department. The award is designed to encourage academic research into business-to-business (B2B) marketing, given that DSM stands to benefit from the findings of such research. As the award’s geographic focus extends to the whole of Europe (as is also the case with the TIME international business course), DSM expects to receive a number of foreign entries next year.

The jury was asked to assess 12 entries. Jan Dopper, a member of DSM’s Managing Board of Directors, had the following to say when he presented the B2B Marketing Award to Anne-Sybille: “There were three reasons why we liked your paper so much: the spirit of enterprise it exuded, the detailed description of brand equity, and the extensive literature search. These factors combined to make it more of an expert opinion than simply an academic paper!”

Joost van Dijk of Rotterdam’s Erasmus University came second, winning a cash prize of €250 for his paper entitled ‘Customer satisfaction & loyalty in Dutch B2B markets’.