Coming into Booth, I knew for my summer internship that I wanted to recruit for Associate Brand Manager positions in the CPG space, specifically in Chicago. When I heard that MillerCoors was sponsoring a Case Competition through the Kilts Center for Marketing, I was really excited to apply. I formed a team with some of my favorite people at Booth (Lindie Wang, Patrick Yates, David Hanna) and we named our team the Case Crushers. Follow along our timeline below as we tackled the case.
The Kickoff
At the kickoff event we learned that 21-24 year olds are drinking less beer than prior generations and are shifting to wine and spirits. Even more problematic, there was no beer brand in the market that spoke to young drinkers in a relevant way, as no innovation had occurred in the space in for years.
Our task was to create a strategy to recruit 21-24 year olds into the beer category and build a preference for beer using Two Hats (a new brand MillerCoors was launching to tackle this problem head on) as the center of our strategy. We created a short-term plan for launch success and came up with a long-term plan to develop the category. Our entire team was taking Marketing Strategy so we knew we’d be armed with a strong toolkit that would help us tackle the case. We were excited to demonstrate what we had learned so far about the Chicago Booth approach to marketing.
The Competition
The competition itself was a blast. The Case Crushers had fun working together and came up with some pretty cool ideas, which we later found out the Two Hats team planned to take back and explore further after the case competition.
On top of getting to know so many of the MillerCoors team members throughout the Case Competition, another big perk was that we presented to a panel of MillerCoors senior leaders, Booth faculty, and Kilts representatives.
Living up to our namesake, the Case Crushers crushed the case and placed first in the competition! The winning prize was first round interviews for internships and tickets to a Bears game in the Miller Lite party deck seats. The football game was right before finals week and it was a perfect break from studying. Locking down our first guaranteed first-round interviews made us all breathe a sigh of relief, too.
The Wrap-up
Heading into recruiting season last year, I knew that MillerCoors was where I wanted to work and I was fortunate enough to get an internship offer for Summer 2018. I really enjoyed the people I met throughout the process; and beer is a category with a lot of consumer passion that seemed exciting to work in.
MillerCoors lived up to all of my expectations. The people were kind, supportive, incredibly smart, and passionate about their brands. I really liked my project, my team, and the other interns. The work was challenging and interesting, and taught me new skills. And, of course, being an intern came with its own perks, too. One of the highlights was going out on the MillerCoors sailboat one day.
I had an awesome summer and am thrilled to have accepted a return offer to start at MillerCoors in 2019.
