Contact: Eric Whittington, 336-758-5030, 800-722-1622 or [email protected]
WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. - Students from eight leading MBA schools examined the marketing of HIV/AIDS drugs in South Africa at the 12th annual Babcock MBA Marketing Case Competition held Jan. 31-Feb. 3 at Wake Forest University's Babcock Graduate School of Management.
A five-judge panel that included Dr. David Ho, scientific director of the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center and Time magazine's 1996 person of the year, selected Harvard University as the winner. The Harvard team won $5,000 and a first-place trophy for its response to a marketing case provided by the event sponsor, pharmaceuticals company GlaxoSmithKline. The student teams had 36 hours to develop a plan for GlaxoSmithKline to market HIV/AIDS drugs in South Africa.
"We are determined to take back the best ideas we heard from the presentations and put them into practice at GlaxoSmithKline to help the lives of HIV patients in South Africa and around the world," said Peter Hare, vice president of GlaxoSmithKline's HIV business unit. "There is clearly a sense of energy to put these ideas into action. We had to have a return on our investment and we needed some fresh ideas to justify our expenditures and our executives' time, and the results exceeded our expectations."
The case and the sponsor's identity remained undisclosed until the teams received the case on Thursday, Jan. 31. Teams presented their marketing plans on Saturday, Feb. 2.
Other judges were Claude Allen, deputy secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services; Stephen Jones, senior vice president and chief marketing officer of The Coca-Cola Co.; Marian Chapman Moore, associate professor of marketing at Duke University; and Dr. Peter Moore, medical and corporate affairs director for GlaxoSmithKline South Africa.
Charles Kennedy, associate dean for academic affairs and the director of the Flow Institute for International Studies at the Babcock School, wrote the case and donated the $5,000 author's fee to UNAIDS, a United Nations program to fight the spread of HIV/AIDS. Kennedy challenged the participating schools to match the gift. Second-year Babcock MBA students Michelle Horton and Beverley Sylvester served as co-chairwomen of the competition. Tom Ogburn, executive professor of management at the Babcock School, served as faculty adviser.
Members of Harvard's winning team were Lyn Baranowski, Edrienne Brandon, Wesley Brandon, Jeff Norton and Sheeba Philip.
The University of Texas at Austin placed second and received $3,000. Team members were Timothy Evers, Elizabeth Gorski, Ned Lavelle, Tyler Norwood, Rosanna Picillo, Guillermo Rospigliosi and Joan Saslow.
The third-place prize of $2,000 went to the University of California at Berkeley. Team members were Jay Badenhope, Kerry Barthold, Jason Daniel, Alice Eagleson, Nancy Iverson, Eric Meyerson and Jason Saculles.
Teams from Cornell University, Columbia University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Yale University and Wake Forest also competed.
The competition, believed to be the oldest of its kind in the country, exposes students to realistic business challenges and provides prospective employers with an opportunity to gauge the students' marketing skills.
More information on the competition is available online at www.mba.wfu.edu/case/.
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