Norwegian thesis prize for Double Degree in Marketing Student Annika Jubbega

Annika Jubbega, alumnus of the de Double Degree programme in Marketing (comprising the Master’s degree programmes in Marketing Research (FEB) and Strategic Marketing Management (BI Oslo)), has been awarded a prize for the best Master’s thesis in the field of Marketing Research. The prize is awarded by BI Norwegian Business School, which organizes the double degree programme together with FEB.

The award was presented in Oslo last week, during the degree certificate ceremony where 564 BI Master’s students received their diplomas. The prize includes 25,000 Norwegian kroner (over EUR 3200) donated by the marketing research bureau Opinion and an interview in the Norwegian financial daily Finansavisen.

Annika Jubbega (24) wrote a thesis on the influence of Twitter on the share prices of a number of major international companies. She discovered that it is worthwhile for companies to stimulate online word-of-mouth publicity among satisfied customers. The thesis prize jury was impressed by her analysis of the numbers of tweets and the changes in share prices from day to day over a long period of time.

Annika studied this relationship between tweets and share prices for the ten most valuable brands, Coca-Cola, IBM, Microsoft, Google, McDonald’s, Intel, Nokia, Disney, Toyota and Cisco, and found results for five of these brands. The number of tweets for Coca-Cola and Toyota turned out to have a temporary positive effect on the share prices. For Disney and Microsoft, tweets and share prices have positive effects on the brand sentiment index, whereas the opposite applies to Nokia, where an increase in share price leads to an increase in the number of tweets, which in turn results in an improved brand sentiment.

Annika currently works as a CRM analyst for Accenture.

More information: prof. dr. Jaap Wieringa, thesis supervisor of Annika