Celebrating Guzi Huang’s PhD Success! 🎉 

Last Friday, December 5, was a truly special day: Guzi Huang successfully defended her doctoral thesis at the University of Mannheim! Her dissertation, “Selling Sustainable Products in B2B Markets:
An Empirical Investigation of the Effects of Pricing, Value Crafting, and Value Communication on Buyer Responses” tackles one of today’s most pressing questions: How do individual B2B buyers make trade-offs between price and sustainability in their purchasing decisions? Blending the worlds of sales, sustainability, and empirical research, her work offers fresh and highly relevant insights for B2B practitioners by exploring how individual- and organizational-level factors act as contingencies in these trade-offs.

Conducted at the Chair of B2B Marketing, Sales & Pricing, her dissertation was supervised by Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. mult. Christian Homburg, with Prof. Dr. Florian Kraus serving as second examiner. Her research proposes price–sustainability fit as a fundamental pricing principle for sustainable products and demonstrates how selling firms can leverage relational and sustainability-related signals to strengthen buyers’ value perceptions. Moreover, she shows that framing strategies need to be aligned with both the emission-reducing context and buyer characteristics to achieve greater effectiveness. Taken together, her work illustrates how sustainability can be utilized as a strategic source of value rather than merely being treated as a cost factor.

After four years of deep dedication, curiosity, and resilience, Guzi’s successful defense marks the close of an inspiring chapter and the start of an exciting new one. We couldn’t be prouder! Congratulations to Guzi on achieving this major milestone. We wish her only the best and continued success and joy on her path ahead.