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At the third annual marketing case competition hosted by the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University April 23, a team comprised of five students—two of them from Chicago GSB—took first place.
Part of a five-member team, part-time students Sumeet Johar and Shaun Dudley developed a business plan for Motorola to introduce two cellular phones this fall—one with an MP3 player, another that could provide stock quotes and business news easily. “We had five hours to decide who Motorola should target, how they should price the phones, and how they should distribute them, then present our plan to executives from Motorola,” Johar said.
The team targeted younger consumers for the first phone and business executives for the other; Johar said the push-pull marketing plan they developed probably won them first place. “We used a distributor to push the phones by offering incentives, and also did a marketing campaign for consumers so they would ask for the phone,” he said.
Johar, an evening student, said he heard about the case competition through the Marketing Management and Research Group, which is organized by part-time students.
With Johar and Dudley, the winning team included students from Kellogg, Loyola University Chicago’s Graduate School of Business Administration, and University of Illinois at Chicago Liautaud Graduate School of Business. A student from each of the competing schools comprised the other teams; the winning team was the only one that included two students from Chicago GSB. “Working with Shaun, it worked really well because I knew that if he asked me to look at something, or I asked him, it was based on facts, not just an assumption.”
Dudley agreed. “It was about trust and reliability,” he said of working with Johar. Dudley added, “It was a competition, but it was fun. It allowed us to touch all facets of the business, including sales and marketing.”
—Patty Houlihan