On October 24th professor Valarie Zeithaml was awarded an honorary doctorate from BI Norwegian Business School. The ceremony was part of BI’s 75th year anniversary celebration. “We are very proud and honored that doctor Zeithaml accepted this award. As in many schools around the world, Valarie Zeithaml’s work has been a central part of our marketing curriculum. Her work has had a tremendous impact here in Norway as in many other countries,” says The Head of Department of Marketing at BI, Professor Line Lervik-Olsen. With her sparkling personality, Valarie Zeithaml gave a captivating speech about thirty years of service quality research for a full house in BI’s biggest auditorium. (read more about her career also here).
After the ceremony, Valarie Zeithaml met with faculty and the PhD students in the Department of Marketing to give another presentation, this time sharing her experience from her long and productive career in academia and in industry. She shared her early struggle to do research on services marketing at a time when many in the field were unreceptive to the topic. Fortunately, she and other pioneers in the field challenged these barriers and created the discipline. She stated that, “coming to BI and finding so many interested and intelligent faculty and doctoral students was an inspiration. The beautiful new BI building was the ideal place to celebrate the University’s Jubilee year.”
While being in Oslo Valarie Zeithaml and her husband Jan-Benedict Steenkamp had a busy schedule. The celebration started on October 23rd with a formal dinner for the honorary doctors, hosted by The President of BI Norwegian Business School, where both guests from the industries and BI’s Provosts were present. After the main ceremony on October 24th, they took time to experience Oslo and its main tourist attractions including The Holmenkollen ski jump and The Vigeland Sculpture Park. During the whole visit the weather was excellent, presenting Oslo’s beautiful autumn colors.
