Marketing Summit 2010: A Student's Recap

This year’s Wake Forest Marketing Summit was a monumental hit regardless of the brutal weather that besieged us on Friday. With wonderful sponsors such as IBM and Cheerwine and dozens of student competitors from all over the world, such as Brigham Young, Ohio State, Toronto, London, and Spain, this event was bound to be successful.

The website, www.marketingsummitlive.com, was ranked 427,559 in the US on its first day of launch, according to Alexa. Considering that there are more than 3 billion sites worldwidem this is an amazing number. The official website also had more than 23,000 hits by Saturday evening's big finale.

The summit offered many opportunities for other cohorts and disciplines to jump in and take advantage of events. For example, the evening MBA and the MA students volunteered for the event. They also had the opportunity to participate in the luncheon and networking event. This year, the networking event was planned in such a way that everyone had an opportunity to meeting executives from two to four different companies. Big kudos to David and Poonam for their leadership!

The diversity panel discussion, which was held Friday evening, was opened to the public and had great representatives from companies such as IBM, McDonalds, Wal-Mart, Pepsico, and Hewitt Associates, to provide unique perspectives around diversity at the workplace.

The gala, held Saturday at the Millennium Center, was an amazing closing event for the Marketing Summit to honor the teams, VIP guests, and the volunteers. Wake Forest placed 2^nd at the graduate level. The award presenter, also one of the case judges, commented that they presented a very professional and complete marketing plan.

All of the Marketing Summit co-chairs, committee leads, and volunteers did an amazing job in making the event successful. As this summit has completed, it has ignited a lot of fire in the full time and evening MBA students, graduating in 2011, to understand how they can add value to the next year’s summit.

~Bobbie Shrivastav