Let talented Master Business Administration students improve your company's branding.

✅ Key points of the challenge

• You will have up to 3-6 teams of 5 students, each working on separate aspects of your brand (if desired)
• Start to end: November 3, 2025 – December 19, 2025
• Each team will spend approximately 150 hours working on your challenge.
• The student teams are supervised by lecturers from Radboud University
• Deliverables are a presentation and an advisory report
• To help facilitate this challenge, a participation fee of €1200,- (ex tax) applies
• Your time investment: up to 20 hours (bi-weekly Q&A questions)

💡 Context

During this challenge, teams of master students (approx. 3-6) will help you out, improving your branding in such a way that it contributes to your economic success. The teams will start the process from a strategic, branding standpoint. They scan the brand (using internal and external information) and provide recommendations for adjustments.

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 by using state-of-the-art academic literature.

This analysis will allow you to make better decisions for successfully branding your business.

📑 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'll meet the teams in a session to introduce your business case and highlight your key focus areas. Each of the student teams will then explore your challenge from a different perspective, giving you a variety of insights, strategies, and possible solutions.

Some examples 👇

• “In my opinion, my brand could have several important values, which ones should I chose to build my 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 2 people working full time in the company.
• Not limited to a specific industry or sector.
• 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 €1200,- (ex tax)

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 summarises the challenge. Subsequently, briefly elaborate on your challenge (max 150 words).

🗓 Planning

• October 21: Deadline for submitting your challenge
• October 21: Receiving message if your challenge is approved by the lecturer
• November 3: Our matching algorithm will create perfect matches
• November 4-12: Kick-off meeting between teams and companies
• November 22, Draft Brand Audit Document handed in
• December 18, 2025, 1pm-5pm: 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, 2026, Final Brand Audit Documents delivered

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