MISB Bocconi bags 2nd position at the Mallenial Challenge organised by Bestsellers, Unbox Retail

Three of us Ovya, Thejaswini, and Shruthi at MISB Bocconi took time out from our busy schedules and volunteered to enter into a b-school competition – The Mallennial Challenge organized by BestSellers, unBox Retail.

The challenge was to survey a Retail Mall and study its demographics to suggest out of the box strategies in order to improve footfall in that mall. We could choose a single mall or a multitude of malls under the same management. Bonus points were allocated to suggest strategies to improve footfall in any one of the BestSeller stores. The deliverables included a 15 slide Powerpoint with 2-5 strategic recommendations and the detailed data analysis of the market research conducted in the field.

Though it seemed tough at the beginning, we took it up wholeheartedly and rushed to our faculty – Dr. Anjana Grewal a Senior Professor of Marketing and Corporate Governance, who was the official faculty mentor for this project. We named our team ‘ Bocconi Esploratore’. She was happy with our initiative and was overwhelmed with the enthusiasm and set the project goals straight. She also highlighted the problems and the rejections that we would face while conducting the consumer survey. Three of us were determined and chose the Seawoods Grand Central Mall-Navi Mumbai for this challenge. It was a new mall and we wanted to study the mall in this nascent stage.

On the day of competition: Out of 114 entries across India, the competing teams (national finalists) were from IIM A, MICA, XLRI Jamshedpur, IIM Raipur and MISB Bocconi. They were impressed with our presentation skills, our recommendations and applauded us for the structure and the depth of research we had undertaken. That several of our recommendations were under implementation made a difference. It was a full day of masterclass where we were given exclusive access to attend retail classes and discussions among retail stalwarts.

During retail strategy awards, it was announced that MICA stood 1st and MISB Bocconi stood 2nd and IIMA stood 3rd among these entries.

More details about the competition: https://unboxretail.com/#/mallennial

Written by Shruthi Sharma, Class of PGPB 2019 | Participant names Ovya RK, Shruthi Sharma, and Thejaswini KS