SBS Blog > Students win their Pitch by Roxanne Colinet

Students win their Pitch

By Roxanne Colinet - Posted on 26 April 2018

Students Roxanne Colinet and Ellen Grieve took part in a nationwide marketing competition and were declared winners at the CIM Marketing Excellence Awards. Here, they talk about their journey through the competition experience.

We found out about The Pitch through the University of Strathclyde; it is a UK-wide marketing competition open to all students registered in CIM-affiliated universities. This year, the challenge was to create a 2500 word marketing plan pitching an idea that would allow Wilkinson Sword to build a band of advocates amongst young men and women. The next stage of the competition was to pitch a 10 minute presentation to a panel of judges. The top three finalists then were invited to the CIM Marketing Excellence Awards to be awarded their prize.

Ellen and I have been friends throughout our university degree, and both have very strong work ethics when it comes to our education and business disciplines. When finding out about The Pitch through our marketing lecture, it was not a question of if we would work together, but when we would start the project!

The full impact of the competition didn't really hit us until we made the finals competing against 10 other teams at the CIM Headquarters in Maidenhead. We realised there and then how great an opportunity The Pitch is for students; it allowed us to put our learning into practice and fully develop our marketing plan and pitch the idea to well-established marketing professionals. The day in itself was fantastic, the judges were great with feedback, and very willing to stay in touch with us and help with any questions we had regarding pursuing a marketing career. After, The Marketing Excellence Awards were a great opportunity to network, with 600+ of the UK's top marketers in attendance.

When going through the brainstorming process, the idea of creating a gender neutral line was the first idea to come to mind. This was because of the current social views and changing views of genders among our peers both at university and social media. From this basic concept, we created our pitch to be based around the slogan "do it for you", the idea that young people should be shaving for their own empowerment and to take over their own bodies. This was done in conjunction with releasing a gender-neutral razor line focusing on areas of the body. We believe we won because we are the target market ourselves, and we know what is most culturally relevant to 16-24-year-olds. We also believe that we won because it was such a departure from the current offering and it would help Wilkinson Sword stand out.

Having put more effort into this project than any other project either of us had taken part in in our lives, we were fairly confident in our chances. We were fully convinced of our idea and managed to convince anyone and everyone we talked to that it was a good idea. When we found out we were in the top three, we were a bit emotional but also so content with how all of our hard work had paid off.

We were in shock initially when told we’d won! No one ever believes that they will win a nationwide competition. Later, we just felt very humbled by the whole competition - it was great seeing all of our hard work paying off. When it came to the judges' comments, they explained that the decision was unanimous and that they were very impressed by the sheer work put into our plan.

Being the only second year group to make it to the top 11 finalists, initially we felt apprehensive as we had not learned how to properly write a marketing plan. However this just motivated us to push forward and teach ourselves. However, our tutor Thomas McAlinden was very helpful in this process. Regarding the Strathclyde Marketing course, we feel like our learning enabled us to be both bolder and more original than other finalists.

Entering a competition like The Pitch not only helps improve your CV by showing your enthusiasm for your subject, but it helps to put the theoretical learning from the course into real life practice. We all know that the business environment is very volatile, and trying to implement the theories into this context is invaluable. Also, it is a great chance to meet fellow peers who are interested in marketing, as well as get your name out there to future employers.