Case Competition Season

Sorry for the delay this week guys! I was out of town this past weekend with little internet access (or time for blogging). Anyways over the last few weeks (and this week) are a bunch of competitions ensuing at school. Some of the options include:
-Consulting Case Competition
-Entrepreneurship business plan competition
-Stock Pitch Competition
-Marketing Case Competition
And a few others too that I forget. Because I want to work in marketing (and to avoid spreading myself too thin) I signed up for the Marketing one above. I’ll give you guys a sense of what the competition was like as this was my 1st one and I really had no idea what I was getting into!

The case competition was sponsored by General Mills (the guys who make cheerios among other things). On Oct 2nd the General Mills released the case to us. We had to come up with a marketing strategy and tactics to revitalize the Apple Cinnamon Cheerios brand.

We were only allowed teams of 4-5 and the # of teams were capped at 10. I found some of my friends who also want to work in marketing who are also hard-working, fun and creative (important for marketing jobs!!) and we made a team.

So on Oct 2 we got the case and on Oct 9 we needed to create and present to General Mills, our plan. So a week to organize. However, given all of the other things going on at school too (and that we all had different commitments at different times), free time meant case competition prep time.

After a few marathon group sessions we got our presentation finalized, the night before.

On Oct 9, round 1 was a presentation to a General Mills marketing team member (various groups presented to various General Mills judges) as well as Q&A with the judge. After that round was the finals. If you made it to the finals, you presented in front of all of the judges and the marketing director at General Mills.

Unfortunately our team didn’t win but I still felt really good about the work we did. Doing the competitions taught me a lot of valuable lessons about time management, teamwork, presentation skills and coming up with creative solutions to tough business problems (in a very short time!!).

Also, after the competition I got to meet the General Mills people and learn a lot about the company. Important info to have since it is one of the companies I would be potentially interested in working for or with in the future!