Four marketing students from the University of Otago won the Marketing Association’s National Brand Challenge competition.
Teams from seven New Zealand universities were given a real-life case submitted by the beverage company Frucor. They were asked to market a new “Sparkling Oh” drink as the brand’s first entry into the healthy drink market.
The Otago team — Jake McKay, Grace Fuhrer, Geena Billows and Hilary Derrick — had 10 days to prepare a 15-minute presentation at the competition, held in Auckland last month.
Derrick said the results were “very close” and the team was “ecstatic to be announced as the winners amongst such tough competition”.
The team received their award at the TVNZ Marketing Awards, which were held in front of 750 people from the marketing industry.
Derrick said this provided the team with “the opportunity to network with marketing professionals from all over New Zealand”. She said the experience had been “extremely humbling” and she was “grateful to have been a part of it”.
Senior lecturer and coach of the Otago team, Dr John Guthrie, attributed the success to the team’s ability to show “why their strategy would work in terms of the size of market and projections into the future”.
Guthrie said the team was “well picked” and had a good relationship, which is “often what makes a team stand out from other universities”.
The University of Otago has a good track record at the brand challenge, with last year’s team also taking away the first prize. Guthrie, who also coached that team, said “each year the standard goes up, so we were not sure what to expect”.
The judges of the competition included people from IAG, Frucor and Genesis.