by Shiva Badruswamy, Marketing Club Member 2000-2002 MBA 2002 When people asked me what I did during spring break, I told them I went to Rochester. I could see disbelief written all over their faces. But, believe me, the trip was quite exciting. |
The four of us –me, Sachin Maheshwari, Nob Seki and Alejendro Zarate – found ourselves traveling to Rochester to take part in the Simon School of Business’ Collaborative Marketing Case Competition. The road to Rochester was pretty interesting. I got to see weather conditions as extreme from a clear day in Pittsburgh to a fog blinding us totally as we approached Erie to 6 inches of snow in Rochester (whew! it snows there in April). However, the weather did not affect us too much as we all traveled comfortably in Nob’s big Dodge Durango.
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For those who don’t know, a collaborative case competition is one in which students from different B-Schools are grouped together to form a team. This type of grouping really challenges you as you need to work with a set of people whom you’ve known only for a couple of hours (assuming you were not totally drunk at the ice breaker). The competition was held on Saturday, May 31. We left from GSIA on Friday. After six hours of listening to a dozen different radio stations and taking half a dozen wrong exits, we reached Rochester. We were booked into a hotel called Comfort Inn. We stayed in luxury by accident i.e. we all ended up getting single bedrooms, simply because they couldn’t find us any two bedrooms.
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Soon, we refreshed and went to the icebreaker held in the Schlegel Hall – home to the Simon School of Business – at the University of Rochester. There were MBA students from other good schools like Northwestern, Cornell, and Case Western etc. I had the opportunity to talk to big marketing guns from these schools. However, we ended up talking everything except Marketing. After a bit of searching, I found my three teammates. They were from the University of Rochester, Cornell University and the University of Maryland. All three were genuinely friendly people and I got along with them quite well. (Our sharing of the general disappointment over the economic downturn really bound us together).
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We all looked forward to meeting the next day to thrash out the case and win $2500 in prize money. We just needed to do one round of presentations and had a 5-hour time frame to analyze the case and prepare the presentation. The case required us to suggest marketing strategies to General Mills to help them introduce their new blood pressure - reducing break fast cereal product. As we deliberated, I found out how diverse our thoughts were on every aspect of the case. Moreover, we always managed to show off our marketing strengths through, you know, “...our marketing professors are really good… excellent syllabus…am a marketing pro…” kind of statements.
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The greatest challenge was to turn down non-value adding viewpoints without antagonizing their enunciators.My experiences clearly showed that empathy could win over challenging team members. We all knew that, if we were to win in a marketing case competition, we had to come up with an excellent presentation. With that in mind we divided our responsibilities and put in place a good presentation. Our objective was to use a lot of marketing tools we learnt in our schools to impress the judges. The judges were marketing professionals from Kodak, General Mills and the Hartmann group, a marketing consulting firm. Apparently things worked out well for us and we managed to win the first prize. Alejandro’s team finished second. I will never forget the moment during the awards ceremony when the judges announced that one of the main reasons we won was because we used the perceptual map in our presentation.
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Thanks Ron (Professor Ronald Wilcox) I remembered your words on how perceptual maps could be effectively used in conveying a product’s positioning and suggested this tool to my teammates. (Does this get me an A+?)After winning the booty, we treated ourselves and our friends to drinks in a bar called the Tonic in downtown Rochester. The bar was really cozy and was visited by many beautiful ladies (I thought my MBA status would help but got snubbed by a few of them – anyway after three Tequila shots who cared?). We danced till the wee hours of the morning. Somehow, we managed to get back to the hotel (someone called a cab, huh?).
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The next day, we started back for Pittsburgh. The journey between Pittsburgh and Rochester takes about twelve hours both ways (we wanted to take a detour to the Niagara Falls, but we loved GSIA so much that we wanted to get back as soon as possible). In those twelve hours, I got to know Al, Sachin and Nob more than I could have at GSIA. That was my biggest takeaway of the whole trip.
