Themes from the discussion included: finding something you truly enjoy doing, continuously learning and forecasting your next role, thinking creatively, and appreciating the arts. Perhaps most importantly, Esther Silver-Parker of Wal-Mart advised that students should “spend more time building their skills than their resumes.”

The panelists made a challenge to administrators and professors of higher education to focus on experimental learning and innovation. They encouraged this group to not only teach students yesterday’s business practices but to also teach them how to foresee, manage, and solve tomorrow’s problems. Glover recommended professors complete internships in Corporate America so they are always on the edge in preparing students for the future.

The panelists reminded us of how diverse our individual skill sets must be, and they promoted our participation in thought-provoking events like the Marketing Summit Case Competition.

In the time we spent together, I found Ron to be a kind and humorous mentor-like figure who provided great advice in my personal career search. He was empathetic to how this economy was affecting job placement and gave me advice on how to position my MA degree in this competitive job market.

As I finish writing the last of my thank you notes to the executives I spent time with this weekend, I can only be thankful for the opportunity to create these relationships through the intricately planned Marketing Summit. With every hand I shake and every business card I pocket, I feel more comfortable networking and more confident in expressing my career aspirations.

~ Lauren Collins

The event, sponsored by Altria, is best characterized as a type of career search speed dating. Students rotated through the nine rooms of various executives, spending 10 minutes in each room. Talk about the importance of making a good first impression! The executives encouraged us to ask them anything!

In the time I spent with Fleishman and Hillard senior vice president Britt Carter, we covered everything from today’s current job market and the hard work ethic it has generated in job applicants, to the imperative of PR account managers to tell a company they represent, “no, the event you have in mind might do you more harm than good,” even at the risk of losing an account. What follows a conversation like that? At F&H, it’s creative thinking and a reliance on the relationships that they are so excellent at cultivating.

The students were eager to learn and the executives were more than willing to share their stories and offer advice. I walked out of my time with Primo Water, Cheerwine and HigherApps representatives feeling that three successful businessmen genuinely wanted to know how they could help, and encouraged that in interviews, if I show who I am and articulate passionately that my time has been well spent in previous jobs, internships and classrooms, the recruiters you will want on your side, in the end, won’t miss the value.

~Elisabeth Holby

And finally pictures of this athletic competition have surfaced (courtesy of the team from IESE), giving us all a glimpse into efforts to remove stress in the midst of a 36-hour marathon case preparation!

Among the interesting behind-the-scenes tidbits:

• Team captain Michael Hrostoski only slept for 20 minutes on a hardwood floor during the home stretch of the 36-hour case prep;
• Chad Stultz was responsible for the team’s mock ads and a 30-second commercial;
• Judges told OSU that having solid financial data was the differentiator;
• Prize money will be used to throw a party for the entire business school, following a donation to OSU

A perusal of blogs and other social media posts unveil more of the back story for the OSU team. Their strategy involved only four hours of work the first night and much of the second day was spent in small groups hammering out the proposal. PowerPoint crashed twice the night before as the team was preparing its slides. When the group found time to venture out to eat, they went to Little Richard’s for BBQ and Bojangle’s. At least one member of the team will return to North Carolina to participate in the Duke MBA games in April.

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

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

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

“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.

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.