Kilts Center Marketing Case Competition
The Marketing Case Competition helps students hone essential skills in marketing, management, and consulting. Students get hands-on experience in brand management by using Nielsen and other consumer data to tackle a real-world marketing challenge for a sponsoring company.
Student teams develop innovative marketing and growth strategies that they pitch to a panel of judges comprising faculty and senior-level executives. The winning team often gets to see its pitch come to life in the sponsoring company’s marketing efforts.
Upcoming Events
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2022 Competition Highlights
Ferrara Candy Company sponsored the 2022 Marketing Case Competition, tasking students with a plan to recover and position Now + Later for the greatest success .
Six teams were selected to compete. On the presentation day, teams pitched their best ideas to help make the brand relevant, requested, and successful for years to come by ideating around the amplification opportunities ahead. They presented to Chicago Booth faculty and staff as well as to Ferrara team members, including Jenny Chen, Brand Manager, Laffy Taffy and Now and Later, Dave Foldes, Director, Trolli and Taffy, and Andrea Millender, Brand Analyst, Now and Later.
The judges were impressed by the strong, cohesive presentations that had a clear set up and tied back to the case, as well as how the teams used in-market examples and insights from external research and haloed back to the larger Ferrara portfolio. The teams came in strong with strategic short and long-term recommendations, ensuring a focus on the low-hanging fruit as well as out-of-the-box thinking. And of course, the teams brought a palpable level of excitement to the brand and the case, which was apparent through the creativity in their storytelling, visual presentations, and thoughtfulness of their answers to the judges’ questions.
At the end of the day, Ruthvik Basavaraj, Becky Schmid, and Katie Irving, who comprised Team Now or Team Later, took home third prize. The Candy-Changers, made up of Winnie Lui, Eva Chen, Amanda Harbrecht, and Anaga Sriram secured second place. First place went to the SOUR Bias team, Austin Li Coon, Ishani Desai, Brinda Doshi, and Sanjana Puri.