Students envisage the future of brands

AUTHOR: Deborah Tarrant   DATE: 08.12.05   ISSUE 3, 2005

Signal clothing, developed in conjunction with a pharmatechnology company, can indicate a wearer’s viral and bacterial levels, and the range comes with ‘cool’, purposeful accessories that replace nicotine patches and denote HIV status.

The inspired creative thinking behind this quirky, forward looking concept saw 3 AGSM MBA students win the 2005 Landor ‘The Future of Brands’ competition.

Illustration: Gregory Baldwin

The fashion company is about to unveil its most significant development yet, the gene jeans which are all about finding the perfect genes. They change colour according to the human genome and promise to assist people in their search for the right genetic partner.

The inspired creative thinking behind this quirky, forward looking concept saw three AGSM MBA students win the 2005 Landor ‘The Future of Brands’ competition.

The competition was established to stimulate creative business thinking by some of the country's sharpest business students.

The winning presentation by Krista Walter, Alex Spurzem and Brendan Voller met the challenge of managing to surprise the judges, according to judging panel member Damian Borchok, executive director of brand consulting for Landor Australia. He complimented the winning team members, not only for their idea, but for the way they had extrapolated it and demonstrated a clear understanding for developing relationships between brands – in this case, an established fashion label and a successful pharmatechnology group.

This is the third year brand and design consultancy Landor Associates (formerly LKS Landor) has combined with AGSM to run the student competition aimed at challenging existing conventions on brands.

The competition was established to stimulate creative business thinking by some of the country's sharpest business students, according to Landor’s managing director Michael Graham. It invites competitors not only to visualise the role of brands in the future, but “to break the mould wide open”. A cash prize of $3,000 is awarded annually to the winning team.

This year nine teams convened by AGSM’s Marketing Club presented their visions for the future through a practical brand case study.

Briefed and coached by Landor’s Damian Borchok and AGSM’s Professor of Marketing John Roberts, the teams were encouraged to project on what lies ahead for brands in the immediate or more distant future by addressing real-world business challenges. Presentations took place in two rounds, with each team of three allowed 15 minutes to outline their proposal and submit a 600 word executive summary to the judges. In question and answer sessions at the end of each presentation, audience members and the judges were able to raise issues and delve further into the students’ thought processes.

The competition winners and runners up pushed the traditional boundaries of marketing through their insightful content and some very persuasive and thoughtful arguments.

John Roberts and Damien Borchok were joined on the judging panel by Richard Curtis, director of brand consulting at Landor, and Dr Julien Cayla, senior lecturer in marketing at AGSM.

Delivering their solutions to experienced in-market consultants is just one clear benefit to emerge from the competition for the students, says President of AGSM Marketing Club Heidi Schoenherr. The participants proved eager to seize the opportunity to create their own concepts and present fresh ideas, she says. Competitors are drawn from across the MBA enrolment and entry is not restricted to those with a marketing specialisation. The competition holds novel appeal for students as it differs from the typical analytical and numbers-driven MBA assignment, says Schoenherr, enabling students to test and explore original themes and to stretch their own imaginations.

"The participants proved eager to seize the opportunity to create their own concepts and present fresh ideas." Heidi Schoenherr

PHOTO: Taek Yang

From Landor’s perspective, the competition winners and runners up pushed the traditional boundaries of marketing through their insightful content and some very persuasive and thoughtful arguments in the presentations, according to Graham. “Controversial and provocative discussion on the future of brands is heard from some extremely impressive thinkers.

“Many ideas are quite left of field,” he says, “ but it’s the process of thinking outside of traditional means that is critical to the future success of brands.”

This year’s winning entries met the mark for originality and stimulating content. Apart from the step-back-in-time presentation exploring the future of the fashion brand by the first place getters, runners up Bobby Sandhu, Mark Hodgson and Vinod Kumar delivered an impressive macro-perspective in The Rise and Effect of the Consumer Brand.

The team suggested consumer groups bound by socio-economic similarities would become large, powerful bodies negotiating better deals for consumers, promoting greater brand interaction and, effectively, becoming consumer brands themselves.

The mooted growth of the consumer brand would bring an upsurge in consumer bargaining and activism, the growth of permission marketing and infomediaries, the team argued, concluding that the benefits to companies would be in better communication with consumers, more targeted product development, customised bundling, a higher return on marketing spend. Ultimately, there would be a rise in more socially conscious brands, as companies could not afford to run the risk of being boycotted by such sizeable and influential consumer bodies.

In his presentation speech, Damian Borchok commended the runners up for the strength of their presentation and for clearly articulating a big idea.