As part of a case competition hosted by the Kilts Center for Marketing and Kraft Foods, 11 student teams from the Booth School of Business took on the challenge of revitalizing one of Krafts’ most recognizable brands– Capri Sun. Many of the students on these teams probably drank the iconic juice-in-a-puch brand growing up.
The teams’ challenge wasn’t as simple as poking a straw through the top of the drink. They had three days to stabilize the business in the short term and make the brand more relevant, requested and successful for years to come. The winners of the competition were guaranteed an internship interview at Kraft and given the chance to have dinner with Kraft’s Chief Marketing Officer Deanie Elsner, ’92.
The winners were students in the Evening and Weekend MBA Programs: Amanda Davis, Antoine Jennings, Bharath Kumar, and Danielle Largay. The team kept “consumer needs first and foremost” but found that “It’s really easy under that short time frame to just start throwing ideas out there,” said Davis.
This was the third iteration of the case competition. The Kilts Center partnered with Kraft to launch the case competition in fall 2013, with the goal of better preparing students for internships by giving them the chance to work through tangible, real-world business problems. In the second case competition this past fall, the Kilts Center adapted the case in response to participant feedback, paring down the narrative component of the case and giving teams access to the Nielsen database to build their recommendations. Next year, the team plans to enhance the profit-and-loss components of the case so students can further analyze the financial impact of their recommendations.
Info and quotes used in this post are attributed to an article by Julie Ginsberg from the Booth website.