FEB alumnus Riko Ooijevaar wins Dutch Marketing Thesis Award 2010

On 8 June, former FEB student Riko Ooijevaar has won the national Marketing Thesis Award 2010 with his thesis "Social networks - The search for social capital". The prize, which was awarded for the fifth time, is awarded annually to the best graduation research of marketing students in the Netherlands. Earlier, Ooijevaar's thesis already won the Leeflang Thesis prize of the FEB department of Marketing. The Dutch Marketing Thesis Award comes with 2500 euros prize money.

To determine the winner of the Dutch Marketing Thesis Award, marketing associations in various cities chose their best marketing theses to compete in the final. A jury consisting of Patrick Ruys (partner of VODW), Janny Hoekstra (professor at FEB), Peeter Verlegh (Associate professor at Rotterdam School of Management), Hans Hagenaars (Director Marketing at ING) and Theo van Vugt (editor of a marketing journal), chose the best thesis. The jury looked at the academic level, the innovative character and practical applicability.

In the thesis award final on 8 June at VODW in Leusden, the finalists presented their case in a couple of minutes, after which they were interrogated critically by the jury. From the top 3, Riko Ooijevaar was eventually chosen as winner. He is now an alumnus and works at TNS Nipo. He carried out his graduation research into segmentation in social networks at FEB, under commission of KPN's Hi. His thesis supervisors at FEB were Peter Verhoef and Hans Risselada. Ooijevaar investigated what characterizes relationships in social networks and analyzed it with the method of segmentation. A segmentation not only based on demographical, psychological or users' criteria, but also on their relationship and position in the social network.
The jury praised Ooijevaar's clear and accessible style and his new ideas, also from an academic point of view.

See also: Riko Ooijevaar wins Leeflang Thesis Prize 2010