LEAD Marketing Case Competition
An inter-batch marketing competition where teams develop full go-to-market strategies for real brands facing real challenges — judged by industry professionals.
The LEAD Marketing Case Competition is one of the institution's most academically rigorous student events — a competition that asks teams not to theorise about marketing, but to do it: developing full, detailed, implementable go-to-market strategies for real brands facing genuine challenges.
The 2023 edition drew sixteen teams from across batches. Each team received a case brief forty-eight hours before the competition — a real scenario drawn from an actual brand challenge (with company details anonymised). The brief included market data, brand positioning history, competitive landscape analysis, and the specific question the brand was grappling with.
Teams worked intensively over two days, building their strategies from the ground up: consumer research frameworks, positioning recommendations, channel strategies, messaging architecture, campaign concepts, and financial projections. Presentations were limited to twenty minutes, followed by a fifteen-minute Q&A from the judging panel.
The judges — comprising a marketing director from a consumer goods company, a digital strategy consultant, and a brand strategist from an advertising agency — assessed presentations on strategic clarity, creative insight, commercial viability, and the quality of thinking under questioning.
What distinguished the best presentations, as one judge noted in the debrief, was not production quality or confidence — it was evidence of genuine thinking: the willingness to challenge assumptions in the brief, to make uncomfortable recommendations, and to back them up with logic rather than enthusiasm.
The winning team — presenting a repositioning strategy for a mid-market apparel brand targeting Gen Z consumers — was praised for a proposal that was both creatively bold and analytically grounded. Their recommendation to exit a distribution channel that was damaging brand perception was counterintuitive, clearly argued, and, in the judges' view, commercially correct.
The competition reinforced something the faculty has long believed: that the best way to learn marketing is not to study campaigns, but to build them.
