National Institute of Industrial Engineering (NITIE), Mumbai, won ‘Lessons in Marketing Excellence’, the inter-college marketing case-study competition held under the aegis of Hindustan Unilever Ltd. (HUL) and CNBC-TV18 on March 20, 2010. The winning team ‘Front Runners’ from NITIE, comprising of Jeeta Das, Abhijit Kamra and Jitin Sharma, first-year students of PGDIM course.The competitors included the 6 IIMs (ABCLIK), ISB Hyderabad, XLRI Jamshedpur, FMS (Delhi University), SP Jain Mumbai and JBIMS Mumbai at the Grand Finale held yesterday at Taj Colaba, Mumbai and attended by noted industry stalwarts and dignitaries.

The competition consisted of 3 highly competitive rounds and only the best 12 management institutes of the country were invited to participate. The first round was an intra-college selection round, where different B Schools were given live case studies from different industrial sectors. In the next round, a live case study on Knorr soups and Ready-to-Cook category was organized by HUL. The two teams from NITIE and IIM Ahmedabad were declared winners of this round, where after they faced each other at the Grand Finale. The final round focused on a case study concerning the recently finalized Govt.of India initiative, Unique Identification Number (UID).Nandan Nilekani, Chairman, UIDAI, Govt.of India and former chairman, Infosys Technologies was present to grace the occasion. Other dignitaries present in the audience included noted ad-filmmaker, Prahlad Kakkar, Marten Pieters, Global Head, Vodaphone, Kishore Biyani, CEO, Future Group and CNBC head-honcho, Anuradha Sengupta. The jury of the Finale included eminent personalities such as Rama Bijapurkar (thought leader on market strategy and author of the well-received book, ‘We are like that only – Understanding the Logic of Consumer India’), R Balakrishnan (Executive Creative Director, Lowe), Shrijeet Mishra (Executive Director, HUL Foods), Gopal Vittal (Executive Director, HUL) and Sanjay Pugalia (Editor, TV 18).