First Industrial Marketing Management South America Summit

It is always with some trepidation that one plans a first event. At least, Carla Ramos, Danny Claro, C. Anthony Di Benedetto, and I were somewhat anxious to see how the First Industrial Marketing Management South America Summit would pan out.

We should not have worried, especially not Tony and I because we were blessed with Carla, Danny, and Insper and their hard work. We had 40+ very engaged participants from not only Brazil (the summit was hosted by Insper in Sao Paulo), but also from Chile, Denmark, Peru, the US, and Wales.

At the start of the summit, we had a round table where Guilherme Dabdad from Suzano and José Luiz Ronchetti Filho from Boticário Group discussed challenges, opportunities, and trends in B2B that their organizations experience. Many thanks also to Gabriel Gonzales and Willy Bolander for leading this interesting discussion.

Christopher R. Plouffe delivered the keynote lecture at the Summit. Thank you so much, Chris, for your interesting thoughts on your personal journey and your research.

We had colleagues presenting their interesting papers. These papers were organized in themes: artificial intelligence in B2B marketing; B2B customer satisfaction, and reaching the B2B customer. Thank you all for sharing great research with everyone.

In addition to a meet-the-editors session (Tony and myself), the summit also featured an academic-practitioner paper development workshop. Together, academics and practitioner worked on real challenges that particular organizations face and how academics could help practitioners to find solution. This session was led by Rob Morgan. Thank you to Rob and all participating academics and practitioners. It was a lot of fun.

Fabio Duran, Marcos Severo, Giuliana Isabella, and Colin Gabler won Best Paper award. The runner ups were Guilherme Sales Smania, Néstor Fabián Ayala, Wim Coreynen, and Glauco H.S. Mendes (one runner up) and Christopher Nelson, Lana Waschka, and Gary Hunter (the other runner up). Big congratulations.

And, of course, we had a nice welcome reception, lunches, and dinners, all organized by Carla, Danny, and Insper.

Tony and I are looking much forward to continuing to work with B2B colleagues in South America / Latin America. Thank you all for making the first event a success.