Summit Updates

Wake Forest’s marketing summit was “executed with precision.” The event was very well-organized and the competition was stiff. From beginning to end, every small event involved big names, high sophistication and warm collaboration. But, in my view point, this mega event will be remembered for one term – relationships.

Every stake holder, volunteer, participant, team, sponsor, coordinator and staffer involved in this event must have developed new relationships of varying nature. To speak for myself, I connected with new executives from the sponsoring companies, volunteers across the various programs, members of participating teams, and a couple of professors. (I hope all of my volunteer friends are witnessing new friends’ requests in their various social networking accounts.)

I propose that all of us when evaluating this event should count the “relationship” factor.

Of course, the effectiveness of these newly developed relationships will depend upon how much we invest in these relationships, but this chapter of Marketing Summit, surely, more than satisfied each one of us looking forward to network, collaborate & make new friends.

Hopefully the next chapter of the event provides each of us with further opportunities to foster relationships.

-Rahul Goyal

Greetings from Ohio! We just touched down in Columbus around an hour ago. We wanted to take a moment though to thank everyone involved in this amazing weekend.

First of all, thank you to Wake Forest University and the Wake Forest Schools of Business. Everyone on this team was a veteran case competition participant, and the Wake Forest Marketing Summit was the finest case competition that we have been to so far. Every moment of the weekend was carefully orchestrated, and the student volunteers worked around the clock to accommodate our team.

Thank you to the corporate sponsors who made the whole weekend possible. Huge thanks to IBM for the giant $50,000 check. Thanks to BB&T for sponsoring the gala on Saturday night. Finally, thanks to Cheerwine for providing the beautiful and incredibly heavy Cheerwine Cup. On a side note, Jeremy and Ed couldn’t get enough Cheerwine this weekend; they probably went through a couple of cases by themselves.

Thank you to all the judges who came out to Wake Forest from all over the country. We hope that some of the ideas that the teams came up with this weekend can be implemented in the near future. If you need help with the implementation phase, several of us would be more than happy to assist after we graduate in June.

Thank you to the other teams for making the weekend enjoyable. We really enjoyed interacting with students from some of the finest MBA programs from around the world. It’s always a pleasure hearing about other schools and taking home some best practices to make the program better.

Finally, a huge thank you to Marc Ankerman, our case competition coach. Marc is the heart and soul of the MBA case competition program at The Ohio State University. He spends a lot of his personal time coaching the teams, meeting with us one on one, and traveling to case competitions.  We have grown so much as presenters under his tutelage and the Fisher College of Business is lucky to have him.

Now it’s back to the books as many of us have midterms this week.

Thanks again for an amazing experience,

Mike Hrostoski
Vandana Agrawal
Ed Lapteanu
Jeremy Jacobs
Seth Blatter
Ryan Kilpatrick
Chad Stutz

What will the team from Ohio State University do with the $50,000 cash prize from this weekend’s Marketing Summit?

Team members said their foremost objective involves a donation to their school, followed by a party to celebrate a well-earned victory. The remainder will be used to pay for student loans and other debt, they said during an interview immediately after their winning presentation.

IBM, the Summit’s primary sponsor, had challenged students to spend 36 hours developing a comprehensive marketing plan for its Smarter Cities program, an initiative designed to revitalize developing markets.

Wake Forest University’s MBA program finished second, followed by Dartmouth College.

In the undergraduate competition, the University of Pennsylvania won the first-place prize of $10,000 for their marketing plan focused on IBM’s Smarter Planet initiative. Their challenge was to evaluate the market conditions, dynamics, and environmental factors IBM should consider in order to ensure the success of the program.

For undergraduates, Emory University placed second, followed by the University of Maryland.

Read the full news release

Will having an international element advantage either of the overseas teams to compete in the Marketing Summit?

“We’d like to think so,” Elizabeth Laws, of the IESE Business School said. “We’ll find out later.”
IESE, from Barcelona, and the London Business School had perhaps the longest treks. Each team then endured the 36-hour planning session only to discover that they were among the last teams to present their cases. It was quite a long wait for two teams that had traveled so far.

Coffee and adrenaline were the obvious antidotes, along with a sense of purpose for a case designed to improve the quality of life in Dubai.

“The topic was one that we could identify with,” Zoe Villanueva of IESE said. “We can really help the people of Dubai. This is one case study where you really want to succeed.”

Next up for IESE? Rumor is that the team is planning a snowball fight. “We don’t feel sleepy at all,” they said.

The Dartmouth College team was determined to show the judges that a quartet could do extraordinarily well in the Marketing Summit comprised mostly of larger units.

Running lean, they knew going into the 36-hour marathon session that their resources would be stretched but they believed that having a tight cohesive unit would give them an edge. “We’d do it all over again,” Paul Smart said.

“You can divide and conquer as a big group,” added John Lojek. “But that can also mean having too many cooks in the kitchen.” The formula allowed the Tuck School of Business team to quickly reach consensus and avoid getting bogged down in two-hour conversations.

Placed in the afternoon queue, the team was glad that they had the ability to sneak in a three-hour nap and develop more perspective and practice for the message they delivered. “It is good to finally see the light,” Lojek said.

The judges for the Marketing Summit might seem a bit on edge for afternoon presentations as they remain left in the dark over a basketball game in neighboring Virginia.
Judges were reportedly huddled around TVs during the lunch break watching Wake Forest’s road game against the University of Virginia. Much to the arbiters’ chagrin, the teams ended up deadlocked at 55, destined to head into overtime.
The judges meanwhile were left with no choice but to return to the presentations and deliberation, completely oblivious as to the game’s final outcome. Most should be pleased … Wake pulled out a 3-point victory in overtime.

UPenn’s undergraduate team had a fantastic presentation, and now they are turning their sights to cleaning up their conference room.

“It’s in organized disarray,” said Amber Jin, mentioning leftover pizza and empty Gatorade bottles as part of the mess. The five-member team was still laughing and cohesive even after hours without sleep.

What was the Marketing Summit’s greatest challenge?

Ashley Yuki said it involved interpreting the case in a way that could be packaged in a short amount of time. “There were a lot of things to process,” she said. “We had to work really hard to make it cohesive.”