In the last few days, I've partook in Wharton Korea's Business Black Box competition. While the majors that I wish to attend (at the moment) are largely distant from marketing and business, my dream is to initiate a startup venture, and since I will partake in some corporate activity regardless of whether I wish or not, I decided to give it a shot.
I quickly got a team together by choosing some of the smartest among my friends--we got a team of 9 with remarkable diversity with members from New Jersey to Jeju Island. We had gathered in a while, but we were still good friends, so there wasn't even a tinge of awkwardness.
So this is how BBB works:
Participants are given a sponsor company before the competitions starts
When the competition starts, participants are given a topic live at the venue
Each 9-member teams discuss about a marketing strategy for the topic and company on the first day
Teams present their marketing strategy on the second day, and the best teams do a final presentation to figure out the final winner.
Although there had been some changes due to COVID-19, the rules were largely similar.
This time, the sponsor company was a Korean contact lens company Interojo, and the topics were:
Present a marketing strategy for a blue light filtering lens that Interojo had developed
Present a marketing strategy for the color lens line that Interojo is producing
We chose the first topic.
So, as the title tells us, post-mortem:
We had too much ideas. I remember reading research about how a NBA team with only the top 5 best players performed poorly compared to a NBA team that had only a few best players. It was mainly because each of the members Just as such, because I had chosen the smartest 9 people in humanities that I know, we had an excess of ideas rather than a dearth of ideas. We were unable to deliver such an excess in a short time of 10 minutes, and our presentation was, as a result, unorganized.
From next time, if such happens, as team leader, I would set a priority number to the many ideas. Then, I would daringly cut out many of the ideas that seem to be relatively unimportant. This time, I was too indecisive in cutting out the extraneous ideas, and hence our presentation did not have focus and direction.
But the ppt design had gone well. We prepared the design elements on the day before, so that we could easily create the ppt under a lack of time. I've attached our PowerPoint with all our ideas for prospective participants to see.
Team 17
.pdf
Download PDF • 9.19MB
But still, this was my second business competition, and it was lots of fun!! I would highly encourage prospective participants to take part in the competition.
(Pictures below, the handsome guy standing third from the left is me)
