During this challenge, 1-2 teams of master students will help you improve your branding. Your teams will start the process from a strategic, branding standpoint. They scan the brand (using internal and external information) and provide recommendations for improvements based on collected insights.

This allows you to make better decisions for successfully branding your business.

Insights are developed based on research within your company, investigating the external environment (e.g. customers, competition, trends, etc.), surveys conducted by the students, and using state-of-the-art academic literature.

✅ Key points of the challenge

• Number of teams per challenge: 1-2 teams of 5-6 students (each team has a captain that will be the contact person)
• Course: International Brand Management
• Program: Master Business Administration
• Duration: November 2023 - January 2024
• No. of hours spent per team: 150 hours
• Supervision: The student teams are supervised by lecturers from Radboud University
• Deliverables: Presentation and an advisory report
• Company time investment: Your time involvement is 8-12 hours in total (e.g. weekly (short) meetings, interviews, final presentation, etc.)
• Matching fee: €950,- (ex tax, charged by Master Challenge (NOT the university))

📑 Main deliverables and challenge examples

The main deliverables are a presentation and an advisory report containing recommendations for your challenge. At the start of the course, you can discuss your most important focus areas with the teams.

Some examples 👇

• “Which (brand) values should we chose to build our brand around?”
• “I have low awareness despite my marketing efforts. What can I do to improve it?”
• “I have several products. How should I best align them in my portfolio?”
• “I want to launch a green line of my products. How should I best do it?”
• And much more…

❗️Please note that we are looking for challenges involving strategic brand management issues, which go beyond (but often include aspects of) marketing (communication or execution). By strategic brand management we mean the process of developing and executing an integrated and consistent long-term strategy about how to brand your company and/or your products/services in such a way that people understand your company('s offerings) in a desirable way.

🏢 Requirement for participating companies/organisations

• Any company/organizations (startup/scale-up/corporate/incubator/NGO) with at least two people working full time in the company.
• Not limited to a specific industry or sector. However, we have a slight preference for B2C companies.
• A problem that requires a strategic branding (and not ‘only’ Marketing or Communication) lens. Strategic branding looks beyond execution and communication; it is about the long-term strategic developments of the key values and brand image linked to your business (but has over-arching implications for Marketing and Communication).

💰 Costs

To help facilitate this challenge Master Challenge issues a fee of €950,- (ex tax) in total for all teams assigned to your challenge.

PLEASE NOTE: You will only be charged when matched.

📨 How to apply

You can submit the challenge directly through the website. Provide a title that summarizes the challenge. Subsequently, briefly elaborate on your challenge (max. 150 words). Click here for a template you can use.

🗓 Planning

• October 20 (extended deadline): Deadline for submitting your challenge.
• October 21 (or earlier): Receiving message if the lecturer approves your challenge.
• October 26, 10am-11 am: Plenary kick-off (online) for challenge owners, in which the lecturers and Master Challenge will discuss the next steps.
• November 6-7: Matching phase.
• November 6-10: Kick-off meeting between teams and companies.
• November 24: Brand Audit Draft.
• Dec 19, 13.30-19.15: Final presentations in time slots of 20 minutes (after you are matched to a team, we will schedule the time slots). After the presentations, private meetings can be scheduled with the teams to discuss certain aspects.
• January 20, 2023, Final Brand Audit Documents.

Questions? Want to discuss your challenge before submitting one? Feel free to schedule a call 👉 here.