We are very proud to announce that the winner of the 2020 marketmind Best Thesis Award was written at the Service Marketing and Tourism Institute. Ms. Nikol Balacheva won the first place with her thesis "Buzz Marketing Based on Unique Users' Ratings and Their Normalization in Time. Homogenization or Diversification of Movie Preferences?" supervised by Alexander Kulumbeg.

In her thesis, Ms. Balacheva used advanced forecasting methods on several datasets of movie ratings to conclude what time it takes for movies to reveal their true ratings. "The topic I worked on was different from the standard topics you get to hear about in marketing. I think that more people get excited about coding and understand the increasing importance of being able to work with and understand statistics and how to interpret results," she said.

The Service Marketing and Tourism Institute congratulates to Ms. Nikol Balacheva and is proud of her achievement!

The 2020 marketmind Best Thesis Award took place for the seventh time and rewarded the three best theses of the WU Marketing Master program. The award, sponsored by the Austrian company marketmind, honors both research excellence and societal impact in the field of marketing.