Arijit Goswami and Lohit Reddy, first-year PGDM students from IIM Kozhikode, have won the latest IBS-BLoC Case Study Contest, presented by Hidesign.
The case, ‘Taking on Patanjali with Ayush 2.0’ was developed by the ICFAI Business School’s IBS Centre for Management Research by Debapratim Purkayastha, Associate Dean & Head, Case Research Centre, ICFAI Business School, Hyderabad, and Namrata Prasad, Senior Research Associate at the Centre.
The winning team will receive ₹25,000 in gift vouchers from premium leather goods brand Hidesign.
The case required students to don the hat of a Marketing Manager at Lever Ayush, charged with making it the market leader in the ayurvedic personal care products space and come up with a workable strategy to achieve this. As part of a well-argued strategy , Arijit and Lohit provided a solution to revive the fortunes of Ayush using the 3P Model — Point of Contact, Promotion and Participation.
The contest saw participation from a variety of B-schools, including several IIMs, IMT, the IMIs at Kolkata and Delhi, Anna University, Great Lakes Inst of Management, XLRI, LIBA and IFMR.
Prof Venu Gopal Rao, Professor and Head, Marketing Area, IBS Hyderabad, who analysed the entries, said the winners were able to assess the ground situation and understand the challenges faced by HUL in marketing Ayush products, despite its strong distribution network.
Ritika Kohli and Samyak Ponangi of IIM Indore, came second; the third place went to Ravjot Sachdeva and Nishant Verma, also of IIM Indore; a solo entry from B Vivekanandan of IIM Bangalore was in the fourth spot, while Vaibhav Kavtiyal and Sushmita Vazirani, again from IIM Indore, stood fifth.
All entries by the winning team and the top five runners-up are posted here . So is the next case on the challenge faced by Niantec, maker of the once popular Pokémon Go game. The company is struggling to retain its user base that was eroded by the actions of cheaters. The contest seeks suggestions on what the company can do to revive the game franchise that has great potential.