Marketing Challenge Tests Speed, Creativity, Collaboration
After work yesterday, I went to work. I joined up with 90 other people to practice our marketing craft. Here was the set up. A nascent organization, Windy City Social, was sponsoring a Marketing Challenge. Three business cases were presented and the crowd dispersed into nine teams to tackle the marketing challenges of each case. Pizza, beer, competition and collaboration at the Cubby Bear in Chicago.
The self-acknowledged un-cool General Motor’s Buick division challenged the crowd to help build a marketing program to bring the average age of their buyers down by about 20 years. No longer selling Electras and LeSabres, Buick’s newest models were arguably cool enough for their target 35 – 55 market and they were looking for new ways to get the word out. Southwest Airlines, already in possession of the cool factor, desired to share their “bags fly free” differentiation with less frequent travelers. And for truly “cool” in the literal sense, the Chicago Special Olympics sought to grow participation in its Lake Michigan Polar Plunge annual winter fund raiser, now celebrating its 10th year and having grown to over 1200 chilly plungers.
Teams had 90 minutes to consider the objectives, develop a plan and assemble a presentation. I joined one of the three Polar Plunge teams. Ten of us, having never met and with no appreciation for each other’s skills or background sat in a circle and stared at each other, perfunctory name introductions already forgotten. Go.
Amidst the cacophony of nine teams hammering out their solutions, our group’s leader, Daniel Honigman, filtered the input. Simple, he dictated and we responded by eliminating multiple affinity groups and market segments and focused on one. With that focus, ideas flowed and Daniel contemporaneously captured, structured and edited our draft into a 
rough PowerPoint. Stop.
Nine 5-minute presentations later we’d heard songs, monologues, skits, taglines and positioning statements. The business case sponsors voted and winners were announced. But actually, we all won as each of us refined and sharpened the skills we need in our day jobs including working quickly, effectively prioritizing, collaborating synergistically and presenting convincingly. It was a hard day’s night, but I had a ball.
