Looking to expand your current market? Would you also like to look at new marketing and product ideas, or new partnerships?

MBA Students in an advanced marketing class at the Schulich School of Business are divided into 4 teams. Each team will work with a different company in two ways:

1. Identifying New Market Segments and Opportunities

The team (6 – 8 people in total) will meet with your company to learn about your company and any challenges you may be facing. Based in part on the briefing, as well as direction from faculty, the team will conduct research to identify market trends that can be leveraged to your advantage and, accordingly, make recommendations about new ways to grow your business.

2. Identify Collaboration Strategies

This second part is the most exciting for many companies. As the four companies taking part are not ones that have worked together before, the teams will identify where your companies have synergies, and propose innovative collaboration strategies with the aim of expanding your current businesses through new product or service creation or interesting ways of approaching new market segments.

A previous project example brought together a major retailer, a commercial baker and a packaging company; the result was a new product being sold in retail locations across the country.

On another occasion, a large glass manufacturer, a company that changes glass colour with electric charges, a plastics moulding company and a science-driven crop company were brought together – and three different ways were found for these companies to work together… including the creation of a light-weight material that can replace steel in multiple applications.

Each of the four teams may propose different collaborations with different combinations of clients, so the possibilities are endless. In every class though, the companies all get at least one good, new idea for growth.

On Tuesday, March 27th 2018 a senior member from each company will attend the class to hear the presentations and participate in a faculty-led exercise to help each of the companies determine their best path forward. The class is held from 8:00-11:00AM at the Nadal Campus of the Schulich School of Business which is located in the Ernst & Young Building at 222 Bay Street, Toronto.

The students' objectives are to:

• Provide suggestions for strengthening the perception of the brand in the marketplace.
• Recommend at least one thing the company can do to set itself apart in the marketplace
• Propose at least one new market segment (target audience, not new geographic region) that the company can enter and provide a compelling reason why this makes sense and could be profitable.
• Propose at least one way in which the company can work with one or all of the other companies participating in this project to expand its current business and to approach a new market segment (does not need to be the same as the one above).
• Outline the marketing communications plans needed to support all of the above.
• The groups do NOT need to agree on the collaboration and can all present different ideas.