The winners of this year’s Macy’s Marketing Case Competition are the kind of team that work as they go, according to one member of the winning team, Wharton sophomore Tony Wang.
Organized by the Penn Marketing Undergraduate Students Establishment in conjunction with the 5th annual Macy’s Marketing Advertising and Retail Conference, the competition was designed to give contestants the opportunity to use their marketing skills to put together a case presentation in one week.
The teams’ presentations were designed to showcase students’ marketing ideas to Macy’s on-campus recruiters, and in doing so, help Macy’s solve a real and current marketing case.
The winners’ ideas — which the team presented to leading firms at the MARC networking lunch — will be used in a national campaign. The team also won a cash prize of $500.
The winning team, also known as The 3st (pronounced “Thirst”), included Wang, Wharton sophomore Flora Liu and College sophomore Charley Ma.
All three students write for a fashion blog, which is also named The 3st.
The team proposed a store-design change that showcased the Macy’s “Impulse” section — aimed at juniors — which has not been widely used throughout the company stores but already has a pilot program on the West Coast.
The winning team aimed at “winning the heart of the contemporary shopper” — the tagline for its final presentation.
Using what Wharton senior and competition organizer Timothy Barr described as a “very slick Powerpoint presentation,” the team was able to focus on engaging the judges and “getting them excited in the same way that the judges would hope to get young consumers excited about a revitalized juniors line.”
In addition to their marketing prowess and experience with The 3st blog, the three team members also have backgrounds in fashion.
Wang and Liu both work for the fashion line BCBGeneration.
Wang currently has his own fashion line and is this year’s winner of the 2010 Fashion Scholarship Fund, while Liu is the co-founder of a fashion consulting firm.
Ma focuses on the lifestyle and technology aspects of their blog.
The group prepared for the competition by listening to Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance,” Wang said.
“We looked at pictures of Lady Gaga, too,” Liu said. “She was kind of our inspiration.”
The team members based all of their ideas on their own knowledge of the fashion industry and what they felt would be appropriate for the contemporary shopper, according to Wang.
“I think [the judges] liked how our presentation fed into our image as a whole,” Ma said.
The group is planning to use its prize money to attend New York Fashion Week later this semester.
“They had an excellent proposal and presentation to support it,” Barr said, in reference to the team’s performance. “They took into account both a marketing solution and a retailing solution, something which Macy’s was interested in seeing, and did it very well.”
