Marketing Internship: market research and brand positioning

Alsys is a family business based in Leiden. We develop and build robots for the laboratories of companies you come across all over the world. Our customers are lab managers, QC managers and process engineers at food, chemical and mining companies. The number of companies that buy a system like ours is limited worldwide, the amounts involved are substantial, and the purchasing decision often takes a year or more. That makes marketing a different job here than at a company selling to everyone. That is exactly where your assignment sits. We know what we build and why it works, but we have not yet established which channels get that message to the people who decide, or how we set ourselves apart from the parties we get compared to. You take this on as genuine research, using the methods you have learned in your degree programme. You work directly with our Head of Marketing and you have access to sales, engineering and our customers. At the end you deliver an evidence-based recommendation we can act on.

• Design and carry out market research: desk research, interviews and a survey where useful
• Map out who is involved in the purchasing decision, in the laboratory and in procurement
• Investigate which channels those people actually use: trade media, exhibitions, LinkedIn, search behaviour, recommendations from peers
• Analyse the competition: how other parties position themselves and where the room for Alsys is
• Test our current brand positioning against what the market recognises and believes
• Deliver a substantiated recommendation on the message per audience and on the channels we should invest in
• Join the ongoing work: content, exhibitions, website and campaigns
• Present your conclusions to the management team

• Bachelor's or Master's in marketing, business economics, communications or business administration
• You are in your third or fourth year, or working on your graduation research
• You can set up research independently and support your conclusions with sources and data
• You are comfortable approaching and interviewing people, including customers abroad
• You write clearly in English. Dutch is welcome but not required
• You find technology interesting enough to dig into it. You do not need to be a chemist

• Affinity with B2B or industrial markets
• Experience with LinkedIn Campaign Manager, Google Analytics or SEO tools
• Basic knowledge of chemistry or of working in a laboratory
• German, written and spoken

• A research question we genuinely have open, not an invented internship assignment
• Direct supervision from our Head of Marketing, with short lines to management and sales
• Access to customers, colleagues and the workshop where the systems are built
• Room to base your thesis or graduation research on this assignment
• An allowance of €300 per month plus travel expenses
• A family business where you see what gets built, and where your recommendation is actually used