Students present business case strategies

The Robert Mondavi Winery is facing an assortment of business challenges, including a recession that has affected the entire industry, a global trend toward consolidation of wineries and a worldwide oversupply of grapes.

Last fall, three teams of graduate students from the Lerner College of Business and Economics offered their ideas for meeting those challenges.

The occasion was the final round of the 2002 MBA Case Competition, in which master of business administration students made formal presentations before a panel of judges in MBNA America Hall on the UD campus. The panel consisted of five corporate executives from the Delaware area, who were joined by a special guest judge from the Mondavi company in California.

After the presentations, the judges deliberated and selected the winning team of Dennis Campbell, Robert Clark and Janine Fante. In its presentation, that team suggested such innovations to Mondavi as revamping its logo, cross-marketing all its products, implementing new print and television ad campaigns targeted to younger adults and others who don't currently buy much wine, introducing some new products and repackaging others.

"Overall, I thought the competition was a great success, both for the students who participated and also for the MBA program in general," says Dan Freeman, assistant professor of business administration, who teaches the course that prepared students for the competition. "From the comments I heard, the judges and everyone else who attended were very favorably impressed with the students' high level of preparation and competence."

The competition takes a business case from the Harvard Business Review as its starting point. Students research and analyze the business problems involved in the case and come up with strategic solutions. They then present their analysis and recommendations in a setting designed to mimic a corporate boardroom.

The College held its first MBA Case Competition in 2000, but this year, the event became part of a new program called MBA SUCCESS, which Freeman says is an acronym for the program's goal to Strategically Utilize Case Competitions to Enhance Student Skills. Students in the program take a course, "Being Persuasive in Business Situations," designed to give them a framework for analyzing business problems and persuasively presenting solutions. The case competition serves as the cornerstone of that course, Freeman says.