S. P. Jain Institute of Management and Research (SPJIMR) Mumbai beat teams from 21 Indian business schools to emerge the national winners of the international business game ‘Brandstorm’ hosted by L’Oréal India.
For this year’s edition, a total of 3,100 registrations were received. The teams from SPJIMR beat SCMHRD Pune, IIM Kozhikode, IIFT Delhi and SIBM Pune to win Brandstorm in the Tech as well as the Brand Challenges.
The team Mad Over Marketing comprising Swati Nigam, Samyukta Venkatesan and Mannat Gautam won the Brand Challenge and Prachi Agarwal, Ritali Garg and Sudarshan Ravichandran from team SParks bagged the Tech Challenge. The teams will now represent India at the APAC regional finals.
Roshni Wadhwa, director HR, L’Oréal India said, “Brandstorm gives students the most credible view of what it is like to work at L’Oreal through a series of challenging and creative assignments while providing them mentorship from some of the best marketing minds in the field.
SP Jain won the national finals for their out-of-the-box creativity, excellent team work, innovative digital ideas, thorough market research and an overall well-integrated campaign presentation. The ideas will be further fine-tuned to compete at the APAC finals.
The jury included Jean-Christophe Letellier, MD, L’Oréal India, Roshini Wadhwa, director-HR, L’Oréal India, Sukhleen Aneja, head- marketing innovation, Garnier and Mangesh Someshwar, head- creative duties, McCann India. Each year Brandstorm helps to recruit 150 to 200 profiles for the L’Oréal group. In India, more than 20 employees have been hired through Brandstorm.
For the past 25 years now, a grand total of 95,000 students from 58 countries have participated, learned and grown from Brandstorm. In 2017, L’Oréal globally has reinvented the concept by transforming its business game into an innovation incubator for talent and projects.
For this year, Brandstorm and L’Oréal Paris Men Expert brand invited students to work on a challenge where they had to ‘disrupt men’s grooming with life-changing innovation’. While the Brand Challenge laid emphasis on business, marketing and communications aspects, for the Tech Challenge the participants had to concentrate on developing new technologies, data systems and supply ideas.
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The tech challenge started on January 9, 2017 with the first stage being the Best Pitch followed by national selection. Next stage is the regional selection and the world finals on June 15, 2017.
The Tech Award carries a prize money of € 10,000, Brand Award of € 10,000 and CSR Trophy of € 5,000
Roshni Wadhwa, director HR, L’Oréal India said, “Brandstorm gives students the most credible view of what it is like to work at L’Oreal through a series of challenging and creative assignments while providing them mentorship from some of the best marketing minds in the field.
“Our 2020 vision is to further develop Brandstorm into an incubator for talent, projects and partners; going beyond the program’s original twin goal of communications and talent sourcing,” he added.
Expressing their excitement over winning the national finals, the teams from SP Jain stated that the Brand and Tech competitions combined the excitement of consumer research, market analysis, product pricing and creativity with the real-world rigours of innovating and pushing boundaries.
Having to choose and deliver within competitive categories, using limited resources and stringent time limits, the teams really felt that they honed their teamwork skills and learnt to work under the pressures that one would undergo in a real-world situation.
On June 15, 2017, L’Oréal France will host its first Innovation Fair in Paris, where regional finalists will become exhibitors of their creativity and ideas. Based on the model of tech fairs, young innovators have the opportunity to ‘pitch their projects’ and to convince the jury. Moving away from the previous traditional presentation model,this new concept has increased the participation to 25,000 students for 2017.
